University of Virginia Library

4. PART FOUR
SOCIAL ANALYSIS OF LEADERSHIP

1. CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY. THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND ITS DISINTEGRATING INFLUENCE UPON THE BOURGEOISIE

THE masses are not easily stirred. Great events pass before their eyes and revolutions are accomplished in economic life without their minds undergoing profound modifications. Yery slowly do they react to the influence of new conditions.

For decades, and even for centuries, the masses continue to endure pasively outworn political conditions which greatly impede legal and moral progress. [177] Countries which from the economic point of view are fairly well advanced, often continue to endure for lengthy periods a political and constitutional regime which derives from an earlier economic phase. This is especially noteworthy in Germany, where an aristocratic and feudal form for government, the outcome of economic conditions which the country has outlived, has not yet been able to adapt itself to an economic development of the most advanced capitalist character.

These historical phenomena, which at first sight appear paradoxical, arise from causes of two different, orders. In the first place it may happen that classes or subclasses representing an extinct economic form may survive from a time in which they were the authentic exponents of the then dominant economic relationships; they have been able to save from the wreck a sufficiency of moral prestige and effective political force to maintain their dominion in the new phase of economic and civil development, and to do this even in opposition to the expressed will of the majority of the people. These classes succeed in maintaining themselves in power by the strength of their own political energy and with the assistance of numerous elements essentially foreign to themselves, but which they can turn to their own advantage by suggestive influences. Most commonly, however, we find that the classes representing a past economic order continue to maintain their social predominance only because the classes representing the present or future economy have as yet failed to become aware, of their strength, of their political and economic, importance, and of the wrongs which they suffer at the hands of society. Moreover, a sense of fatalism and a sad conviction of impotence exercise a paralyzing influence in social life. As long as an oppressed class is influenced by this fatalistic spirit, as long as it has failed to develop an adequate sense of social injustice, it is incapable of aspiring towards emancipation. It is not the simple existence of oppressive conditions, but it is the recognition of these conditions by the oppressed, which in the course of history has constituted the prime factor of class struggles.

The mere existence of the modern proletariat does not suffice per se to produce a “social problem.” The class struggle, if it is not to remain a nebulous theory, in which the energy is for ever latent, requires to be animated by.class consciousness.

It is the involuntary work of the bourgeoisie to arouse in the proletariat that class consciousness which is necessarily directed against the bourgeoisie itself. History is full of such ironies. It is the tragical destiny of the bourgeoisie to be instructor of the class which from the economic and social point of view is its own deadly enemy. As Karl Marx showed in his Communist Manifesto, the principal reason for this is found in the unceasing struggle which the bourgeoisie is forced to carry on “at once with the aristocracy, with those sections of its own class whose interests are opposed to industrial progress, and with the bourgeoisie of all foreign countries.” Unable to carry on this struggle effectively by its own unaided powers, the bourgeoisie is continually forced “to appeal to the proletariat, to demand its aid, and thus to launch the proletariat into the political mêlée, thus putting into the hands of the proletariat a weapon which the latter will turn against the bourgeoisie itself. [178] Under yet another aspect the bourgeoisie appears as the instructor, as the fencing-master of the working class. Through its. daily contact with the proletariat there results the detachment from its own body of a small number of persons who devote their energies to the service of the working classes, in order to inflame these for the struggle against the existing order, to make them feel and understand the deficiencies of the prevailing economic and social regime. It is true that the number of those who are detached from the bourgeoisie to adhere to the cause of the proletariat is never great. But those who thus devote themselves are among the best of the bourgeoisie; they may, in a sense, be regarded as supermen, raised above the average of their class, it may be by love of their neighbors, it may be by compassion, it may be by moral indignation against social injustice or by a profound theoretical understanding of the forces at work in society, or, finally, by a greater energy and logical coherence in the translation of their principles into practice. In any case, they are exceptional individualities, these bourgeois who, deserting the class in which they were born, give a deliberate direction to the instincts still slumbering in the proletariat, and thus hasten the emancipation of the proletarian class as a whole.

The proletarian mass is at first aware by instinct alone of the oppression by which it is burdened, for it entirely lacks the instruction which might give a clue to the understanding of that historical process which is in appearance so confused and labyrinthine. It would seem to be a psychologico-historical law that any class which has been enervated and led to despair in itself through prolonged lack of education and through deprivation of political rights, cannot attain to the possibility of energetic action until it has received instruction concerning its ethical rights and politico-economical powers, not alone from members of its own class, but also from those who belong to what in vulgar parlance are termed a “higher” class. Great classmovements have hitherto been initiated in history solely by the simple reflection: it is not we alone, belonging to the masses without education and without legal rights, who believe ourselves to be oppressed, but that belief as to our condition is shared by those who have a better knowledge of the social mechanism and who are therefore better able to judge; since the cultured people of the upper classes have also conceived the ideal of our emancipation, that ideal is not a mere chimera.

The socialist theory has arisen out of the reflections of philosophers, economists, sociologists, and historians. In the socialist programs of the different countries, every word represents a synthesis of the work of numerous learned men. The fathers of modern socialism were with few exceptions men of science primarily, and in the second place only were they politicians in the strict sense of the term. It is true that before the days of such men there were spontaneous proletarian movements initiated by an instinctive aspiration towards a higher intellectual and economic standard of life. But these movements manifest themselves rather as the mechanical outcome of an unreflecting though legitimate discontent, than as the consequence of a genuine sentiment of revolt inspired by a clear consciousness of oppression. It was only when science placed itself at the service of the working class that the proletarian movement became transformed into a socialist movement, and that instinctive, unconscious, and aimless rebellion was replaced by conscious aspiration, comparatively clear, and strictly directed towards a well-defined end.

Similar phenomena are apparent in all earlier class struggles. Every great class movement in history has arisen upon the instigation, with the cooperation, and under the leadership of men sprung from the very class against which the movement was directed. Spartacus, who urged the slaves to revolt on behalf of their freedom, was, it is true, of servile origin, but he was a freed-man, a Thracian property owner. Thomas Münzer, to whose agitation the Thuringian Peasants' War was largely due, was not a peasant but a man of learning. Florian Geier was a knight. The most distinguished leaders of the movement for the emancipation of the tiers état at the outset of the French Revolution, Lafayette, Mirabeau, Roland, and Sieyès, belonged to the privileged classes, and Philippe-Egalité, the regicide, was even a member of the royal house. The history of the modern labour movement furnishes no exception to this rule. When the German historian, Theodor Lindner, affirms179 that the contemporary socialist movement is always “called to life” by nonworkers, we must indeed criticize the statement, which recalls to our mind the working of the necromancer's magic wand: “Let there be a labour movement! And there was a labour movement.” Lindner's statement is likewise inexact and incomplete, because it fails to recognize that this “calling to life” cannot produce something out of nothing, and that it cannot be the work of one of those famous “great men” whom a certain school of historians make the cornerstone of their theory of historical causation—for the coming into existence of the labour movement necessarily presupposes a given degree of social and economic development, without which no movement can be initiated. But Lindner's view, though badly formulated, is to this extent true, that the heralds of the modern labour movement are chiefly derived from the “cultured classes.” The great precursors of political socialism and leading representatives of philosophical socialism, St. Simon, Fourier, and Owen; the founders of political socialism, Louis Blanc, Blanqui, and Lassalle; the fathers of economic and scientific socialism, Marx, Engels, and Rodbertus, were all bourgeois intellectuals. Of comparatively trifling importance in the international field, alike in respect of theory and of practice, were Wilhelm Weitling, the tailor's apprentice, and Pierre Leroux, the self-taught philosopher. It is only Proudhon, the working printer, a solitary figure, who attains to a position of superb grandeur in this field. Even among the great orators who during recent years have been devoted to the cause of labour, exbourgeois constitute the great majority, while men of working-class origin are altogether exceptional. Pages could be filled with the names of leading socialist politicians sprung from the bourgeoisie, whereas in a single breath we could complete the list of political leaders of truly working-class origin whose names will be immortalized in the history of their class. We have Bénoît Malon, August Bebel, and Eduard Anseele; but not one of these, although they are great practical leaders of the working class and potent organizers, is numbered among the creative theorists of socialism.

The presence of bourgeois elements in the proletarian movement organized to form a political party is a historical fact, and one which may be noted wherever the political movement of the international working class is attentively observed. This phenomenon reproduces itself wherever the socialist tree throws out new branches, as may be seen, for example, in Japan and Brazil.

Moreover, this phenomenon must be considered as a logical consequence of historical evolution. Nay more, it has been shown that not merely the presence of exbourgeois in the party of the fighting proletariat, but further the leading role which these play in the movement for proletarian enfranchisement, is the outcome of historical necessity.

The question might arise, and it has in fact been mooted, whether the presence of a large number of bourgeois refugees among the proletarian militants does not give the lie to the theory of the class struggle. In other words, we have to ask whether the desired future social order in which all class distinctions are to be abolished (for this is the common aim, more or less distinctly formulated, of all socialists and other advanced reformers, ethical culturists, anarchists, neo-Christians, etc.) may not come to be realized by a gradual psychical transformation of the bourgeoisie, which will become increasingly aware of the injustice of its peculiar economic: and social privileges. This consideration naturally leads us to ask whether The sharp line of cleavage which exists on the political field between class-parties representing classinterests is really necessary, or whether it is not a sort of cruel sport, and therefore useless and injurious. Rudolph Penzig, editor of “Ethische Kultur,” in a controversy with the present writer, went so far as to claim that the deserters from the bourgeoisie to the socialist ranks were “precursors.” [180] Now this expression logically involves the belief that these bourgeois pioneers will be followed by the whole mass of the bourgeoisie, who will thus come over to the camp of those who economically and socially are their mortal enemies. We might be inclined to speak of this as a theory of hara-kiri, did we not know that hara-kiri is not usually practiced as a deliberate voluntary act, but is affected in obedience to orders from above, to coercion from without. Let us briefly examine the soundness of the theory in question.

The socialist poet Edmondo de Amicis enumerates the factors which he regards as working most effectively for the ultimate victory of socialism. There is the general sense of weariness which, in his opinion, follows a great industrial crisis, and the utter disgust felt by the possessing classes with the unending struggle; there is the anxiety felt by these same classes to avoid at all costs a revolution in which they are destined to perish miserably, overcome by fire and sword; there is, finally, the indefinite need, with which the bourgeoisie is also affected, for rejuvenation and idealism, and for avoiding “the horror of living amid the ruins of an expiring world. [181] A similar train of thought was expressed fifty years earlier by Heinrich Heine, who lacked to make him a fighter for socialism merely the courage to give open expression to his political ideas. In his letters from Paris upon politics, art, and national life he writes, under date June 15, 1843: “I wish here to draw especial attention to the point that for communism it is an incalculable advantage that the enemy against which the communists contend has, despite all his power, no firm moral standing. Modern society defends itself simply because it must do so, without any belief in its own rights, and even without any self-respect, just like that ancient society which crumbled to ruin at the corning of the carpenter's son.” [182]

In many respects, the views of these two poets may be accepted. And yet it seems more than questionable whether a dying bourgeois, society would not defend itself to the last, and endeavour to maintain by force of arms, if need be, its property and its prerogatives, however greatly these might be undermined and threatened, in the hope that the final victory of the proletariat might at least be postponed. Unquestionably, too, Heine's opinion in 1843 that in the bourgeoisie of his day there was a widespread lack of confidence, is open to criticism, see-ing that, as we all know, the bourgeois resistance is to this day animated by a vigourous belief in his own rectitude. But the fundamental thought of de Amicis and Heine is so far sound, in that a society which lacks a lively faith in its own rights is already in its political death-agony. A capacity for the tough and persevering defense of privilege presupposes in the privileged class the existence of certain qualities and in especial of a relentless energy, which might thrive, indeed, in association with cruelty and unconscientioiisness, but which is enormously more prosperous if based upon a vigourous faith in its own rectitude. As Pareto has pointed out, [183] the permeation of a dominant class by humanitarian ideas, which lead that class to doubt its own moral right to existence, demoralizes its members and makes them inapt for defence.

The same law operates likewise where men are absolutely convinced of their sacred right to existence. It is equally valid of national aggregates. Where a nation lacks the sense of such a right, decadence and ruin inevitably ensue. We may regard it as an established historical, law that races, legal systems, institutions, and social classes, are inevitably doomed to destruction from the mioment they or those who represent them have lost faith in their own future. The Poles, widely dispersed, and dismembered among three separate powers, have preserved their nationality and their faith in themselves and in their rights. No power in the world, not to mention the Prusso-Russian microcosm, can annihilate the Polish people whilst their brains still cherish the consciousness of their right to national existence. The Wends, on the other hand, a Slav people like the Poles, owing to the nature of the historical epoch in which they were subdued and to the peculiar circumstances under which this historical occurrence took place, did not succeed in retaining intact the consciousness of their national existence—if they ever possessed one. Even where, as in the Spreewald, they have retained their language, they have been thoroughly absorbed into the German system, and are in our day, as Wends, completely expunged from the history of civilization. Although they inhabit quite a large area of Germany, they have in many cases so utterly lost all sense of their Slav origin as to have become the most ardent Pan-Germanists, although they are in reality Germans only in virtue of the legal fiction of the state and of the customs and speech which have been imposed upon them by their ancient conquerors.

No social struggle in history has ever been permanently won unless the vanquished has as a preliminary measure been morally weakened. The French Revolution was rendered possible only because the ardent pre-revolutionary writers, Voltaire, D'Alembert, Rousseau, Holbach, Diderot, etc., who made so plainly manifest the “immorality” of the economic privileges possessed by the ruling classes of the old regime, had already demoralized (in the psychological sense of the word) a conspicuous portion of the nobility and the clergy. Louis Blanc remarked, apropos of the French Revolution: “Sortie vibrante de l'Encyclopédie, ce grand labortoire des idées du XVIIIe siècle elle n'avait plus en 1789, qu'à prendre matériellement possession d'un domaine déjà conquis moralement.” [184] The unification of Italy, previously broken up into seven states, was effected with a minimal shedding of blood (if we except the deaths that resulted in the struggle against foreigners), and after the foundation of the kingdom there was hardly a single inhabitant of the peninsula who shed any tears over the fate of the fallen dynasties, this attitude of mind forming a strong contrast to what happened in Germany in the corresponding historical period. The reason for the difference was that in Italy the unification of minds had long preceded the unification of administration. In the war of secession in the United States of America, it was not merely the armed strength of the northern states which decided the issue, but also the consciousness of moral error which towards the end of the war began to spread among a large number of the slave owners of the southern states. [185] Examples of this nature could be multiplied at will.

The aim of agitation is to shake the opponent's selfconndence, to convince adversaries of the higher validity of our own arguments. Socialism can least of all afford to underrate the enormous force of rhetoric, the compelling power of persuasion, for it is to these means that socialism owes its great successes. But the force of persuasion has a natural limit imposed by social relationships. Where it is used to influence the convictions of the popular masses or of social classes to induce them to take part in a movement which is directed towards their own liberation, it is easy, under normal conditions, to attain to positive results. But attempts at persuasion fail miserably, as we learn again and again from the history of social struggles, when they are addressed to privileged classes, in order to induce these to abandon, to their own disadvantageous a class and as individuals, the leading positions they occupy in society.

The individual human being is not an economic automaton. His life consists of a perennial, conflict between his financial needs and the interests which bind him to given class or caste, on the one hand, and, on the other, those tendencies which are outside class considerations, outside the orbit of social struggles, and which may arouse in his mind passions capable of diverting him.from a purely economc path, attracting him within the sphere of influence of some ideal sun, leading him to act in ways more. consenant with his own. individual character. But all this applies only to the individual human being. The mass, if we leave out of consideration certain pathological influences to which it is exposed, and which may lead its members into activities conflicting with purely material advantage, is un-_ questionably an economic automaton. The common manifestations of its members are stamped with the seal of the economic interests of the mass, just as the individual sheep of a flock bear the mark of their owner. Consequently the seal need not necessarily be useful to the individual who bears it, nor correspondent with his ends; any more than is the imprint upon the back of the sheep, which often consigns the animal to slaughter. But in the human herd the economic imprint extends its influence into the physical life. The kind of work and of interests imposed by economic conditions makes spirit and body alike dependent on occupation.

It is doubtless true that the socialist doctrine has won over many children of bourgeois families, penetrating their minds so profoundly as to lead them to abandon everything else—to leave father and mother, friends and relatives, social position and respect. Without regret and without hesitation they have consecrated their lives to the emancipation of humanity as conceived by socialism. But we have here to do with isolated instances only, and not with compact groups representing an entire economic class. The class to which the deserters belong is no wise weakened by the desertion. A class considered as a whole never spontaneously surrenders its position of dyanlage. It never recognizes any moral reason. sufficiently powerful to compel it to abdicate in favour its. “poorer brethren.” Such action is prevented, if by nothing else, by class egoism, a natural attribute of the proletarian as of other social classes, with the difference that, in the case of the proletariat, class egoism comes in ultimate analysis to coincide—in abstracto, at least—with the ideal of a humanity knowing nothing of classes.It will not be denied that in the various strata of the dominant and possessing classes there are considerable differences in the extent to which this class egoism is developed. There are certain representatives of landed property, and above all the Prussian junkers, who bluntly declare even to-day that we should treat as criminals or lunatics all who claim political, economic, or social rights by which their own class privileges are endangered. There are other classes in modern society less hostile to reforms and less crassly egoistic than the numerically small class of the Prussian junkers; but these too are not accessible to considerations of social justice, except in so far as no sensible injury is offered to their instinctive class interests. The proletariat is therefore perfectly logical in constituting itself into a class party, and in considering that the struggle against the bourgeoisie in all its gradations, viewed as a single class, is the only possible means of realizing a social order in which knowledge, health, and property shall not be, as they are to-day, the monopolies of a minority.

There is no contradiction whatever between the necessity which leads the proletariat to fight the bourgeoisie on the lines of the class struggle and the necessity which leads it to lay so much stress upon the general principle of human rights. Unquestionably, in pursuit of the conquest of power, persuasion is an excellent means to employ, for, as has already been pointed out, a class which has been convinced even against its will that its adversary's ideal is based upon better reasons than its own and is inspired by loftier moral aims, will certainly lack force to continue the struggle; it will have lost that faith in its own rights which alone confers upon resistance a moral justification. Persuasion, however, does not suffice, for a class, even if partially paralysed, by its recognition of the fact that the right of the hostile class is superior to its own, would none the less, hypnotized by its own class egoism, continue the struggle, and would in the end yield to the force, not of words, but of facts. The writer believes that all these considerations suffice to establish as an axiom that the entrance of bourgeois elements into the ranks of the workers organized as a class party is determined mainly by psychological motives, and that it represents a process of spontaneous selection. It must be regarded as a logical consequence of the historical phase of development through which we are now passing, but in view of the special conditions which induce it there is no reason to interpret it as a preliminary symptom of a spontaneous and general dissolution of the bourgeoisie. To sum up, the issue of the struggle which is proceeding between the two great classes representing conflicting economic interests cannot possibly be decided by the passage of individual or isolated moliecules from one side to the other.

2. CHAPTER II
ANALYSIS OF THE BOURGEOIS ELEMENTS IN THE SOCIALIST LEADERSHIP

SOCIALIST leaders, considered in respect of their social origin, may be divided into two classes, those who belong primarily to the proletariat, and those derived from the bourgeoisie, or rather from the intellectual stratum of the bourgeoisie. The lower middle class, that of the petty bourgeois, the minor agriculturists, independent artisans, and shopkeepers, have furnished no more than an insignificant contingent of socialist leaders. In the most favorable conditions, the representatives of this lower middle class follow the labour movement as sympathetic onlookers, and at times actually join its ranks. Hardly ever do they become numbered among its leaders.

Of these two classes of leaders, the ex-bourgeois, although at the outset they were naturally opposed to socialism, prove themselves on the average to be animated by a more fervent idealism than the leaders of proletarian origin. The difference is readily explained on psychological grounds. In most cases the proletarian does not need to attain to socialism by a gradual evolutionary process; he is, so to speak, born a socialist, born a member of the party—at least, this happens often enough, although it does not apply to all strata of the proletariat and to all places. In the countries where capitalist development is of long standing, there exists in certain working-class milieux and even in entire categories of workers a genuine socialist tradition. The son inherits the class spirit of the father, and he doubtless from the grandfather. With them, socialism is “in the blood.” To this it must be added that actual economic relationships (with the class struggle inseparable from these, in which every individual, however refractory he may be to socialist theory, is forced to participate) compel the proletarian to join the labour party. Socialism, far from being in opposition to his class sentiment, constitutes its plainest and most conspicuous expression. The proletarian, the wage-earner, the enrolled member of the party, is a socialist on the ground of direct personal interest. Adhesion to socialism may cause him grave material damage, such as the loss of his employment, and may even make it impossible for him to gain his bread. Yet his socialist views are the spontaneous outcome of his class egoism, and he endures the hardships to which they may lead all the more cheerfully because he is suffering for the common cause. He is comforted by the more or less explicit recognition or gratitude of his comrades. The action of the socialist proletarian is a class action, and in many cases it may notably favor the immediate interests of the individual.

Very different is the case of socialists of bourgeois origin. Hardly any of these are born in a socialist milieu. On the contrary, in their families the tradition is definitely hostile to the workers, or at least full of disdain for the aspirations of modern socialism. Among the bourgeois, just as much as among the proletarians, the son inherits the spirit of the father, but in this case it is the class spirit of the bourgeoisie. The young bourgeois has “in the blood” not socialism, but the capitalist mentality in one of its numerous varieties, and he inherits in addition an intellectualism which makes him proud of his supposed superiority. We have further, on the one hand, to take into account the economic conditions in which the bourgeois child is born and grows to maturity, and on the other the education which he receives at school, all of which predisposes him to feel nothing but aversion for the struggles of a working class pursuing socialist aspirations. In his economic environment he learns to tremble for his wealth, to tremble when he thinks of the shock his class will one day have to sustain when attacked by the organized masses of the quatrième état. Thus his class egoism becomes more acute, and is even transformed into an implacable hatred. His education, based upon official science, contributes to confirm and to strengthen his sentiments as a member of the master class. The influence which the school and the domestic environment exercise upon the youthful scion of the bourgeoisie is of such potency that even when his parents are themselves socialist sympathizers, and on moral and intellectual grounds devoted to the cause of the workers, it most commonly happens that his bourgeois instincts gain the upper hand over the socialist traditions of his family. We learn from actual experience that it is very rare for the children of socialists, when they have received the education of intellectuals, to follow in their parents' footsteps. The cases of the children of Marx, Longuet, Liebknecht, and Molkenbuhr, remain altogether exceptional. It cannot be doubted that the rarity of such instances is due to the methods of education which usually prevail in a socialist family, methods which have nothing in common with socialism. Even when it is otherwise, when the immediate family environment is not opposed to the development of the socialist consciousness, the young man of bourgeois origin is strongly influenced by the milieu in which he is brought up. Even after he has joined the Socialist Party, he will retain a certain solidarity with the class from which he has sprung; for example, in his relations with the servants in his household he will remain always an employer, an “exploiter,” in the sociological if not in the coarser sense of the latter term. For the bourgeois, adhesion to socialism signifies an estrangement from his own class, in most cases extensive social and ideal injury, and often actual material loss. In the case of the petty bourgeois, the evolution towards socialism may occur peacefully, for by his intellectual and social conditions the petty bourgeois is closely approximated to the proletarian, and above all to the better paid manual worker, from whom he is in many cases separated by purely imaginary barriers composed of all kinds of class prejudices. But the wealthier the family to which the bourgeois belongs, the more strongly it is attached to its family traditions, the higher the social position that it occupies, the more difficult is it for him, and the more painful, to break with his surroundings, and to adhere to the labour movement.

For the son of a wealthy capitalist, of an official in the higher ranks, or for a member of the old-established landed aristocracy, to join the socialists is to provoke a catastrophe. He is free to give himself up to vague and harmless humanitarian dreams, and even in private conversation to speak of himself as a “socialist.” But as soon as he displays the intention of becoming an active member of the Socialist Party, of undertaking public work on its behalf, of enrolling himself as an actual member of the “rebel” army, the deserter from the bourgeoisie is regarded by his own class as either a knave or a fool. His social prestige falls below zero, and so great is the hostility displayed towards him that he is obliged to break off all relations with his family. The most intimate ties are abruptly severed. His relatives turn their backs upon him. He has burned his boats and broken with the past.

What are the motives which may lead the intellectual to desert the bourgeoisie and to adhere to the party of the workers? Among those who do this we may distinguish two fundamental types.

There is first of all the man of science. The ends which he pursues are of an objective character, but to the vulgar these seem at first sight devoid of practical utility, and even fantastical and extravagant. The stimulus which drives him is idealistic in this sense, that he is capable of sacrificing all other goods to science and its gains. In thus acting, he obeys the powerful impulse of his egoism, though it is an egoism ennobled. Scientific coherency is an inborn need of his nature. Psychology teaches us that in human beings every free exercise of faculty produces a sentiment of pleasure. Consequently the sacrifices which the socialist man of science makes for the party serve to increase the sum of his personal satisfaction. Notwithstanding all the material injuries he will suffer as a bourgeois in joining the Socialist Party, he will have gained a greater inward content and will have a more tranquil conscience. In some cases, too, his sentiments will take the form of an ambition to render signal services to the cause. In his case, of course, this ambition is very different from the grosser ambition of those who look merely for an increase in personal well-being — for a career, wealth, and the like.

The second category consists of those who are inspired with an intense sentimental attachment to socialism, who burn, so to speak, with the sacred fire. Such a man usually becomes a socialist when he is quite young, before material considerations and precautions have erected a barrier in the way of obedience to the impulses of his sanguine and enthusiastic temperament. He is inspired with the ardor of the neophyte and the need for devoting himself to the service of his kind. The principal motives which animate him are a noble disdain for injustice and a love for the weak and the poor, a delight in self-sacrifice for the realization of great ideas, for these are motives which often give courage and love of battle to the most timid and inert characters. With all this, there is usually found in the socialist enthusiast of bourgeois origin a considerable dose of optimism, a tendency to overestimate the significance of the moral forces of the movement, and sometimes an excessive faith in his own selfabnegation, with a false mode of conceiving the rhythm of evolution, the nearness of the final victory, and the ease with which it will be attained. The socialist faith is also in many cases nourished by aesthetic sensibilities. Those endowed with poetical aptitudes and with a fervent imagination can more readily and intuitively grasp the extent and the depth of human suffering; moreover, the greater their own social distance from the imagined objects, the more are they able to give their fancies free rein. It is for this reason that among the ranks of those who are fighting for the emancipation of labour we find so many poets and imaginative writers, and so many persons of fiery, impassioned and impulsive dispositions. [186]

The question arises, which category is the more numerous, that of those who become socialists from reasoned conviction, or that of those who are guided by sentimental considerations. It is probable that among those who become socialists in youth the sentimentalists predominate, whereas among those who go over to socialism when they have attained maturity, the change is usually dictated by scientific conviction. But in most cases mixed motives are at work. Very numerous, in fact, are the bourgeois who have always given a moral approval to socialism, who have held that it is the only solution of the social problem which conforms to the demands of justice, but who do not make their effective adhesion to the doctrine until they acquire the conviction (which at times seizes them quite unexpectedly) that the aspirations of their heart are not merely just and beautiful, but also realizable in practice. Thus the socialist views of these persons are a synthesis of sentiment and science. In 1894, an inquiry was made as to the attitude towards socialism of the most distinguished Italian artists and men of learning. They were asked whether their sympathy with socialist aims, their indifference to socialism, or their hostility to the doctrine, was the outcome of a concrete investigation of socialist problems, or whether their feelings were of a purely sentimental character. The majority of those who replied declared that their attitude towards socialism was the outcome of a physical predisposition, reinforced by objective convictions. A similar answer might doubtless be given by the Marxists, notwithstanding their superb disdain for all ideology and sentimental compassion, and notwithstanding the materialism with which they love to dress their windows. In so far as they are not completely absorbed in party life, or rather so long as they have not been completely overpowered by the ties of party life, they display a strictness of principle which is essentially idealist. [187]

Not all those, indeed, who sympathize with socialism or have a rational conviction of the truth of socialist principles become effective members of the Socialist Party. Many feel a strange repugnance at the idea of intimate association with the unknown crowd, or they experience an aesthetic disgust at the thought of close contact with persons who are not always clean or sweet-smelling. Still more numerous are those held back by laziness or by an exaggerated fondness for a quiet life or, again, by the more or less justified fear that open adhesion to the party will react unfavorably upon their economic position. Sometimes the impulse to join the party is given by some external circumstance, insignificant in itself, but sufficient to give the last impetus to resolution: it may be a striking instance of social injustice which stirs a collective emotion; it may be some personal wrong inflicted upon the would-be socialist himself of upon one of those dear to him, when a sudden explosion of egoism finishes the slow work of altruistic tendencies. In other cases it is a necessity of fate, or the outcome of the illwill and stupidity of human beings, which forces the man who has been a secret socialist to cross the Rubicon, almost by inadvertence. For example, something may happen which discredits him in the eyes of the members of his own class, displaying to all the socialist ideas which he has hitherto jealously concealed. Many a person does not join the party of the workers until, after some imprudent manifestation of his own, an enemy has denounced him in the bourgeois press, thus placing him in a dilemma: he must either make a shameful retreat, at the cost of a humiliating retraction, or else must make public acknowledgment of the ideas which he has hitherto held secret. Such persons become members of the Socialist Party as young women sometimes become mothers, without having desired it. The Russian nihilist Netchajeff made the idea of unmasking these timid revolutionary-minded persons the basis of a scheme of revolutionary agitation. He contended that it was the revolutionist's duty to compromise all those who, while they shared most of his ideas, did not as yet share them all; in this way he would force them to break definitely with the enemy, and would gain them over completely to the “sacred cause.” [188]

It has often been asserted that the receptivity to socialist ideas varies in the different liberal professions. It is said that the speculative sciences (in the strictest sense of the term), such as philosophy, history, political economy, theology, and jurisprudence, are so profoundly imbued with the spirit of the past that those engaged in their study are refractory a priori to the reception of all subversive ideas. In the legal profession, in particular, it is contended there is inculcated a love of order, an attachment to the thing which is, a sacred respect for form, a slowness of procedure, and, if you will, a certain narrowness of view, which are all supposed to constitute natural correctives to the errors inherent in democracy. In a general sense, we are told, the deductive and abstract sciences are authoritative and aristocratic in spirit, and those who pursue these paths of study incline to reactionary and doctrinaire views. Those, on the other hand, engaged in the study of the experimental and inductive sciences are led to employ their faculties of observation, which conduct them gradually to wider and wider generalizations, and they must thus be easy to win over to the cause of progress. The doctor, above all, whose profession is a continual struggle against human misery, must carry in his mind the germs of the socialist conception.

An analysis of the professions of the intellectuals belonging to the various socialist parties does not confirm this theory. It is in Italy and France alone that we find a considerable number of medical men in the socialist ranks, and even here they are less numerous than the devotees of pure science, and conspicuously less numerous than the lawyers. In Germany, the relations between the socialist workers and those medical men who are least well-to-do (the doctors of the insurance-bureaux) are far from cordial. To sum up, it may be said in general terms that the doctor's attitude towards socialism is colder and more hostile than that of the abstract philosopher or the barrister. One reason for his may perhaps be that among doctors, more than among other intellectuals, there prevails, and has prevailed for the past forty years, a materialistically conceived and rigidly held Darwinism and Häckelism. A supplementary cause may be found in the cynicism, often pushed to an ego-centric extreme, by which many doctors are affected, as a natural reaction against the smell of the mortuary which attends their life-work and as an outcome of their experience of the wickedness, the stupidity, and, the frailty of the human material with which their practice brings them in contact.

In certain Protestant countries, in Holland, Switzerland, Great Britain, and America, we find a considerable number of the clergy among the socialists (but this is not the case in Germany, where the state is vigilant and powerful whilst the Lutheran Church is strict and intolerant). These ministers, we are told, make their adhesion to socialism on account of an elevated sense of duty towards their neighbor, but perhaps in addition there is operative the need which is no less strong in the preacher than in the popular orator, to be listened to, followed, and, admired by the crowd—it is of little importance whether by believers or unbelievers.

Here some reference may be made to the abundance of Jews among the leaders of the socialist and revolutionary parties. Specific racial qualities make the Jew a born leader of the masses, a born organizer and propagandist. First among these qualities comes that sectarian fanaticism which, like an infection, can be communicated to the masses with astonishing frequency; next we have an invincible self-confidence (which in Jewish racial history is most characteristically displayed in the lives of the prophets); there are remarkable oratorical and dialectical aptitudes, a still more remarkable ambition, an irresistible need to figure in the limelight, and last but not least an almost unlimited power of adaptation. There has not during the last seventyfive years been any new current agitating the popular political life in which Jews have failed to play an eminent part. Not a few such movements must be distinctively considered as their work. Jews organize the revolution; and Jews organize the resistance of the state and of society against the subversive forces. Socialism and conservatisim have been forged by Jewish hands and are impregnated with the Jewish spirit. In Germany, for example, we see on the one side Marx and Lassalle fanning the flames of revolution, and on the other, after 1848, Julius Stahl working as the brilliant theorist of the feudal reaction. In England, the Jew Disraeli reorganized the forces of the Conservative Party. We find Jews at the head of movements which marshal against one another the nationalities animated by a reciprocal hate. At Venice, it was Daniel Manin who raised the standard of liberty against the Austrians. During the Franco-German war, the work of national defense was organized by Gambetta. In England, Disraeli was the inventor of the watchword “the integrity of the British Empire,” while in Germany, the Jews Eduard Simson, Bamberger, and Larker, were the leading champions of the nationalist liberalism which played so important a part in the foundation of the empire. In Austria, Jews constitute the advance-guard of almost all the strongly nationalist parties. Among the German Bohemians, the Italian irredentists, the Polish nationalists, and in especial among the Magyars, the most fanatical are persons of Jewish race. The Jews, in fact, are capable of organizing every kind of movement; even among the leaders of antisemitism there are not wanting persons of Jewish descent.

The adaptability and the intellectual vivacity of the Jews do not, however, suffice to explain the quantitative and qualitative predominance of persons of Hebrew race in the party of the workers. In Germany, above all, the influence of Jews has been conspicuous in the labour movement. The two first great leaders, Ferdinand Lassalle and Karl Marx, were Jews, and so was their contemporary Moses Hess. The first distinguished politician of the old school to join the socialists, Johann Jacoby, was a Jew. Such also was Karl Höchberg, the idealist, son of a rich merchant in Frankfort-on-the-Main, founder of the first socialist review published in the German language. Paul Singer, who was almost invariably chairman of the German Socialist Congresses, was a Jew. Among the eighty-one socialist deputies sent to the Reichstag in the penultimate general election, there were nine Jews, and this figure is an extremely high one when compared with the percentage of Jews among the population of Germany, and also with the total number of Jewish workers and with the number of Jewish members of the socialist party. Four of the nine were still orthodox Jews (Stadthagen, Singer, Wurm, and Haase). In various capacities, Jews have rendered inestimable services to the party: Eduard Bernstein, Heinrich Braun, Jakob Stern, Simon Katzenstein, and Bruno Schonlank, as theorists; Gradnauer, Eisner, and Josef Bloch, the editor of the “Socialistische Monatshefte,” as journalists; Hugo Heimann, in the field of municipal politics; Leo Arons, as a specialist in electoral affairs; Ludwig Frank, as organizer of the socialist youth. In Austria, the predominance of Jews in the socialist movement is conspicuous; it suffices to mention the names of Victor Adler, Ellenbogen, Fritz Austerlitz, Max Adler, F. Hertz, Therese Schlesinger-Eckstein, Dr. Diamand, Adolf Braun, etc. In America we have Morris Hillquitt, A. M. Simons, M. Untermann. In Holland, we have Henri Polak, the leader of the diamond workers, D. J. Wijnkoop, the independent Marxist, and M. Mendels. In Italy, Elia Musatti, Claudio Treves, G. E. Modigliani, Riccardo and Adolfo Momigliano, R. L. Foà, and the man of science Cesare Lombroso. Even in France, although here the role of the Jews is less conspicuous, we may mention the names of Paul Louis, Edgard Milhaud, and the shareholders of “l'Humanité” in 1904. The first congress of the Parti Ouvrier in 1879 was rendered possible by the liberal financial support of Isaac Adolphe Crémieux, who had been governor of Algeria under Gambetta.

In many countries, in Russia and Roumania for instance, but above all in Hungary and in Poland, the leadership of the working-class parties (the Russian Revolutionary Party excepted) is almost exclusively in the hands of Jews, [189] as is plainly apparent from an examination of the personality of the delegates to the international congresses. Besides, there is a great spontaneous export from Russia of Jewish proletarian leaders to foreign socialist parties: Rosa Luxemburg and Dr. Israel Helphant (Parvus) have gone to Germany; Charles Rappoport to France; Anna Kulishoff and Angelica Balabanoff to Italy; the brothers Reichesberg to Switzerland; M. Beer and Theodor Rothstein to England. Finally, to bring this long enumeration to a close, it may be mentioned that among the most distinguished leaders of the German anarchists there are many Jews, such as Gustav Landauer, Siegfried Nacht, Pierre Ramus, Senna Hoj (Johannes Holzmann).

The origin of this predominant position (which, be it noted, must in no sense be regarded as an indication of “Judaization,” as a symptom of dependence of the party upon the money of Jewish capitalist comrades) is to be found, as far at least as concerns Germany and the countries of eastern Europe, in the peculiar position which the Jews have occupied and in many respects still occupy. The legal emancipation of the Jews has not there been followed by their social and moral emancipation. In large sections of the German people a hatred of the Jews and the spirit of the Jew-baiter still prevails, and contempt for the Jews is a permanent feeling. The Jew's chances in public life are injuriously affected; he is practically excluded from the judicial profession, from a military career, and from official employment. Yet everywhere in the Jewish race there continues to prevail an ancient and justified spirit of rebellion against the wrongs from which it suffers, and this sentiment, idealist in its origin, animating the members of an impassioned race, becomes in them more easily than in those of Germanic blood transformed into a disinterested abhorrence of injustice in general and elevated into a revolutionary impulse towards a grandly conceived world-amelioration. [190]

Even when they are rich, the Jews constitute, at least in eastern Europe, a category of persons who are excluded from the social advantages which the prevailing political, economic, and intellectual system ensures for the corresponding portion of the Gentile population. Society, in the narrower sense of the term, is distrustful of them, and public opinion is unfavorable to them. Besides the sentiment which is naturally aroused in their minds by this injustice, they are often affected by that cosmopolitan tendency which has been highly developed in the Jews by the historical experiences of the race, and these combine to push them into the arms of the working-class party. It is owing to these tendencies that the Jews, guided in part by reason and in part by sentimental considerations, so readily disregard the barriers which the bourgeoisie endeavours to erect against the rising flood of the revolution by the accusation that its advocates are des sans patrie.

For all these reasons, the Jewish intelligence is apt to find a shorter road to socialism than the Gentile, but this does not diminish the obligations of the Socialist Party to the Jewish intellectuals. Only to the intellectuals, indeed, for the Jews who belong to the wealthy trading and manufacturing classes and also the members of the Jewish petty bourgeoisie, while often voting socialist in the elections, steadily refuse to join the Socialist Party. Here the interests of class prevail over those of race. It is very different with the Jewish intellectuals, and a statistical enquiry would certainly show that not less than 2 to 3 per cent of these are members of the Socialist Party. If the Socialist Party has always manifested an unhesitating resistance to antisemite sentiment, this is due not merely to the theoretical socialist aversion for all “nationalism” and all racial prejudices, but also to the consciousness of all that the party owes to the Jewish intellectuals.

“Antisemite socialism” made its first appearance about 1870. Eugen Dühring, at that time Privatdozent at the University of Berlin, inaugurated a crusade in favor of a “German” socialism as opposed to the “Jewish” socialism of Marx and his collabourators. [191] This movement was inspired by patriotic motives, for Dühring held that the victory of Marxian socialism could not fail to result in the complete subordination of the people to the state, to the advantage of the prominent Jews and their acolytes. [192] Towards 1875, Dühring became the center of a small group of Berlinese socialists of which Johann Most and the Jew Eduard Bernstein were members. The influence of this group, however, did not survive the great polemic which Dühring had to sustain with Friedrich Engels, the spiritual brother of “Marx the Jew.” [193] Dühring's influence upon the socialist masses in fact declined in proportion as his antisemitism became accentuated, and towards 1878 it was extinct. In 1894 another attempt was made to give socialism an antisemite tendency. This was the work of Richard Calwer, another socialist of strongly nationalist views, at that time on the staff of the “Braunschweiger Volksfreund.” “For every good Jewish writer,” he declared, “there will be found at least half a dozen who are altogether worthless, but who possess an extraordinary power of self-assertion and an inexhaustible flow of words, but no real understanding of socialism.” [194] Calwer's campaign had, however, no better success than that of Dühring. A year before, when petty bourgeois antisemitism was spreading through the country as an anti-capitalist movement which was forming itself into a poltical party and making victims everywhere, the Cologne congress (October 1893) took up a definite position towards this new political movement. Bebel's report (which in antisemite circles had been anticipated with satisfaction), although far from exhaustive, was inspired throughout by a sentiment friendly towards the Jews. Bebel said: “The Jewish student is as a rule industrious during the greater part of his university career, whereas the 'Germanic' student most commonly spends his time in the drinking-bars and restaurants, in the fencing-schools, or in other places which I will not here more particularly specify (laughter). [195] Wilhelm Liebknecht, in his well-known speech at Bielefeld, notably reinforced the impression hostile to antisemitism produced by the congress. Since that time (if we except certain observations made at the Lübeck congress in 1901 by the barrister Wolfgang Heine in a polemic against Parvus and Rosa Luxemburg [196] —remarks that were maladroit rather than expressions of principle, and at the worst foolish reminiscences of a youth passed as a leader in the Verein deutscher Studenten) the German socialists have remained immune to the virus of race hatred, and have shown themselves quite unconcerned when ignorant opponents have endeavoured to arouse popular prejudice against them by speaking of them as a party of “Jews and their satellites.”

We may now add certain observations upon the frequent adhesion to socialism of members of the plutocracy, an adhesion which at first sight seems so strange. Certain persons of a gentle and charitable disposition, abundantly furnished with everything that can satisfy their desires, are sometimes inspired by the need of undertaking propagandist activities. They wish, for example, to make their neighbors share in the well-being which they themselves enjoy. These are the rich philanthropists. In most cases their conduct is the outcome of hypersensitiveness or sentimentalism; they cannot endure the sufferings of others, not so much because they experience a genuine pity for the sufferers, but because the sight of pain arouses pain in themselves and shocks their aesthetic sense. They thus resemble the majority of human beings, who cannot bear to see pigeons slaughtered but whose sentiments in this respect do not impair their relish for a pigeon-pie.

In the sick brains of certain persons whose wealth is exceeded only by their love of paradox, there has originated the fantastic belief that in view of the imminence of the revolution they can preserve their fortunes from the confiscatory fury of the revolutionists only by making profession of the socialist faith, and by thus gaining the powerful and useful friendship of its leaders. It is this ingenuous belief which has thrown them into the arms of the socialists. Others, again, among the rich, hasten to enroll themselves as members of the Socialist Party, in the dread lest their lives should be threatened through the exasperation of the poor. [197] More frequently, however, as has been well shown by Bernard Shaw, the rich man is drawn towards socialism because he finds the greatest possible difficulty in procuring for himself any new pleasures. He begins to feel a disgust for the bourgeois world, and in the end this may stifle his class consciousness, or at least may suppress the instinct which has hitherto led him to light for self-preservation against the proletariat. [198]

It is a very striking phenomenon how large is the percentage of Jewish rentiers who become members of the Socialist Party. In part his may be due to the racial characteristics of the Jew to which reference has already been made. In part, however, it is the outcome of the psychological peculiarities of the wealthy man afflicted with satiety. In certain cases, again, the strongly developed love of acquisition characteristic of the Jews affords the explanation, where the possibility has been recognized of making a clever investment of capital even in working-class undertakings.

It may, however, be said without fear of error that the great majority of young bourgeois who come over to socialism do so, to quote an expression used by Felice Momigliano, in perfect sincerity and inspired by ardent goodwill. They seek neither popular approbation, nor wealth, nor distinctions, nor well-paid positions. They think merely that a man must set himself right with his own conscience and must affirm his faith in action.

These men, again, may be classed in two distinct categories. We have, on the one hand, the loving apostles of wide sympathies, who wish to embrace the whole of humanity in their, ideal. On the other hand we have the zealots, fierce, rigid, austere, and uncompromising.

But among the socialists of bourgeois origin we find other and less agreeable elements. Above all there are those who make a profession of discontent, the neurasthenics and the mauvais coucheurs. Yet more numerous are the malcontents from personal motives, “the charlatans, and the ambitious. Many hate the authority of the state because it is inaccessible to them. It is the old story of the fox and the grapes. They are animated by jealousy, by the unassuaged thirst for power; their feelings resemble those of the younger sons of great families who are inspired with hatred and envy towards their richer and more fortunate brothers. They are animated by a pride which makes them prefer the position of chief in proletarian Gaul to that of subordinate in aristocratic Rome. There are yet other types somewhat similar to those just enumerated. First of all, these are the eccentrics. It seems natural that those whose position is low should attempt to storm the heights. But there are some whose position is lofty and who yet experience an irresistible need to descend from the heights, where they feel that their movements are restricted, and who believe that by descending they will gain greater liberty. They seek "sincerity"; they endeavour to discover "the people" of whom they have an ideal in their minds; they are idealists to the verge of lunacy.

There may be added all those disillusioned and dissatisfied persons who have not succeeded in gaining the attention of the bourgeoisie to an extent proportionate to their own conception of their genius. Such persons throw themselves on the neck of the proletariat, in most cases with the vague and instinctive hope of attaining a speedier success in view of the deficient culture of the working classes, of gaining a place in the limelight and playing a leading part. They are visionaries, geniuses misunderstood, apostates of all kinds, literary bohemians, the unrecognized inventors of various social panaceas, ratés, rapins, cabotins, quack-salvers at the fair, clowns—all persons who are not thinking of educating the masses but of cultivating their own egos.

The numerical increase of the party, which is associated with an increasing prestige (in the popular esteem, at least, if not in the official word), exercises a great force of attraction. In such countries as Germany, above all, where the gregarious spirit is highly developed, small parties are condemned to a stinted and rickety existence. But numerous bourgeois believe that they will "find in the great Socialist Party what they have not been able to find in the bourgeois parties," a suitable platform for political activity upon a vast scale. For this reason, and above all when the party passes from opposition to governmental collabouration, there results a great increase in the number of those who regard the party as a mere means to their own ends, as a pedestal from whose elevation they can better satisfy their ambition and their vanity, those who regard success not as a goal to be attained for the good of the cause, or as the reward for arduous service in pursuit of ideal aims, but one coveted on its own account for the enlargement of their own personalities. As Arcoleo has well expressed it, we dread the triumph of such persons as if it were the unchaining of hungry wild beasts, but on closer examination we discover that after all they are no more than greedy molluscs, harmless on the whole. These considerations apply to petty affairs as well as to great ones. Whenever the party of the workers founds a cooperative society or a people's bank which offers to intellectuals an assured subsistence and an influential position, there flock to the scene numerous professional socialists who are equally devoid of true socialist knowledge and genuine socialist sentiment. In democracy as elsewhere success signifies the death of idealism.

3. CHAPTER III
SOCIAL CHANGES RESULTING FROM ORGANIZATION

THE social changes which organization produces among the proletarian elements, and the alterations which are effected in the proletarian movement through the influx of those new influences which the organization attracts within its orbit, may be summed up in the comprehensive customary term of the embourgeoisement of working-class parties. This embourgeoisement is the outcome of three very different orders of phenomena: (1) the adhesion of petty bourgeois to the proletarian parties; (2) labour organization as the creator of new petty bourgeois strata; (3) capitalist defense as the creator of new petty bourgeois strata.

1. The Adhesion of Petty Bourgeois to the Proletarian Parties

For motives predominantly electoral, the party of the workers seeks support from the petty bourgeois elements of society, and this gives rise to more or less extensive reactions upon the party itself. The Labor Party becomes the party of the “people.” Its appeals are no longer addressed simply to the manual workers, but to “all producers,” to the “entire working population,” these phrases being applied to all the classes and all the strata of society except the idlers who live upon the income from investments. Both the friends and the enemies of the Socialist Party have frequently pointed out that the petty bourgeois members tend more and more to predominate over the manual workers. During the struggles which occurred during the early part of 1890 in the German Socialist Party against the so-called “youths,” the assertion that during recent years a complete transposition of power had occurred within the party aroused a veritable tempest. On one side it was maintained that the proletarian elements were to an increasing extent being thrust into the background by the petty bourgeois. The other faction repudiated this accusation as a “calumny.” One of the best established generalizations which we obtain from the study of history is this, that political parties, even when they are the advocates of moral and social ideas of profound import, find it very difficult to tolerate the utterance of inconvenient truths. We have seen that the most unprejudiced enquiries are apt to be regarded as the outcome of a vicious tendency to fault-finding. The truth is, however, that an objective and searching discussion of the question leads us to recognize the wrongheadedness at once of those who are content flatly to deny the embourgeoisement of the Socialist Party and also of those who are content to sing the praises of the great socialist petty bourgeois party. Neither view is sound. The processes at work are too complex for solution by easy phrase-making.

It may sometimes happen (although statistical proof is lacking) that in South Germany in certain socialist branches, and still more in certain party congresses, the petty bourgeoisie, though not numerically predominant, can yet exercise a preponderant influence. It may even be admitted that under certain conditions the strength of the petty bourgeois elements and the respect which is paid to them may at times compromise the proletarian essence of the party. Even so rigid a Marxist as Karl Kautsky is of opinion that the attitude of socialists towards the minor distributive trade in general, so that, “on political grounds,” socialists must oppose the foundation of cooperative societies wherever, as often happens, small traders offer a favorable recruiting-ground for socialism. [199]

Wherever it has been possible to analyse the composition of the socialist party, and to ascertain the classes and the professions of its adherents, it has generally been found that the bourgeois and petty bourgeois elements, although well represented, are far from being numerically preponderant. The official statistics of the Italian Socialist Party present the following figures:—Industrial workers, 42.27%; agricultural labourers, 14.99%; peasant proprietors, 6.1%; independent artisans, 14.92%; employees, 3.3%; property owners, 4.89%; students and members of the liberal professions, 3.8%. [200] As regards the German Socialist Party, the writer has shown elsewhere [201] that in all the branches the proportion of proletarians is yet greater than in Italy, ranging from 77.4% to 94.7%. It may even be said, with Blank, that if there is a party in which the proletarian element predominates, it is the German Socialist Party—not indeed in respect of its voting strength, [202] but pre-eminently in respect of its inscribed membership. It is this social homogeneity which renders the Socialist Party so great an electoral force, giving to it a cohesion unknown to the other political parties, and especially to the other parties of the left German liberalism has always been (at any rate since the unification of the empire) a multicolored admixture of classes, united not so much by economic needs as by common ideal aims. Socialism, on the other hand, derives its human materials from the only class which presents those economic, social, and numerical conditions requisite to furnish the greatest possible vigour for the struggle to overthrow the old world and to install a new one in its place. Blind indeed must be he who fails to recognize that the spring which feeds the Socialist Party in Germany, a spring which shows no signs of running dry, is the proletariat, the class of wage-labourers.

We must therefore accept with all reserve the statements of those anarchizing socialists and bourgeois radicals who accuse the Socialist Party of “embourgeoisement” because it contains a certain number of small manufacturers and small traders. The embourgeoisement of the party is an unquestionable fact, but its causes will be found in a process very different from the entry into the organizations of the fighting proletariat of a few hundred members of the middle class. The chief of these causes is the metamorphosis which takes place in the leaders of working-class origin, with the resulting embourgeoisement of the whole atmosphere in which the political activities of the party are carried on. [203]

2. Labor Organization as the Creator of New Petty Bourgeois Strata.

The class struggle, through the action of the organs whereby it is carried out, induces modifications and social metamorphoses in the party which has come into existence to organize and control the struggle. Certain groups of individuals, numerically insignificant but qualitatively of great importance, are withdrawn from the proletarian class and raised to bourgeois dignity.

Where, as in Italy, the party of the workers contains a considerable proportion of bourgeois, most of the posts which the party has at its disposal are in the hands of intellectuals. In England, on the other hand, and still more in Germany, it is otherwise, for here the demand on the part of the socialist movement for employees is met chiefly by a supply of persons from the rank and file. In these countries the party leadership is mainly in the hands of the workers, as is shown by the following table: —

SOCIALIST GROUP IN THE REICHSTAG, 1903-6.

Consequently an entry into the party hierachy becomes an aim of proletarian ambition.

An ex-member of the German Socialist Party who some years ago, having entered the service of one of the bourgeois parties, amused himself by caricaturing his former comrades, declared that the whole party organization with all its various degrees of propagandist activity was “cut upon the military model,” and that the members were “promoted by seniority.” [204] There is at least this much truth in Abel's assertion, that to every member of the party the possibility of gradual advance remains open, and that each may hope, should circumstances prove exceptionally favorable, to scale the olympian heights of a seat in the Reichstag.

Proletarian leaders of the socialist parties and of the trade unions are an indirect product of the great industry. At the dawn of the capitalist era certain workers, more intelligent and more ambitious than their fellows, succeeded, through indefatigable exertions and thanks to favorable circumstances, in raising themselves to the employing class. Today, however, in view of the concentration of enterprise and wealth and of the high cost of production, such a transformation can be observed only in certain parts of North and South America (which explains, it may be mentioned in passing, the insignificant development of socialism in the New World). As far as Europe is concerned, where there is no longer any virgin soil to exploit, the “self-made man” has become a prehistoric figure. Thus it is natural that enlightened workmen should seek some compensation for the lost paradise of their dreams. Numerous are to-day the workers whose energies and aptitudes are not fully utilized in the narrow circle of their professional occupations, often utterly uninteresting and demanding purely mechanical labour. [205] It is chiefly in the modern labour movement that such men now seek and obtain the opportunity of improving their situation, an opportunity which industry no longer offers. The movement represents for them a new and loftier mode of life, and offers at the same time a new branch of employment, with a chance, which continually increases as the organization grows, that they will be able to secure a rise in the social scale. There can be no doubt that the Socialist Party, with its posts of honor, which are almost always salaried, exercises a potent stimulus upon active-minded youths of the working class from the very outset of their adhesion to its ranks. Those who are keen in political matters, and also those among the workers who possess talent as writers or speakers, cannot fail to experience the magnetic influence of a party which offers so rich a field for the use and development of their talents. Consequently we must accept as a logical truth what was pointed out by Guglielmo Ferrero, that while the adhesion of anyone of proletarian origin to the Socialist Party always presupposes a certain minimum of special aptitudes and favorable circumstances, yet such adhesion must be considered desirable and advantageous, not only upon ideal grounds and from motives of class egoism, but also for speculative reasons of personal egoism. For an intelligent German workman there is hardly any other way which offers him such rapid opportunities of “improving his condition” as service in the socialist army. [206] One of the first persons to recognize the bearing of these possibilities, and to utilize them, with considerable partisan exaggeration, for his own peculiar political ends, was Prince Bismarck. During the violent struggle between the government and the Socialist Party he declared: “The position of socialist agitator has to-day become a regular industry, just like any other. A man becomes an agitator or a popular orator as in former days he became a smith or a carpenter. One who adopts this new occupation is often much better off than if he had kept at his old work, gaining a more agreeable and freer life, one which in certain circles brings him more respect.” [207] The allusion to the agreeable and free life of the socialist agitator recalls a phrase used by William II, who, apropos of the Krupp affair, spoke of the “safe ambush” from which socialist editors could shoot their carefully aimed arrows of calumny. The emperor's criticism is unjust, for the socialist editor who departs from the truth is always exposed to the risk of prosecution and punishment. Bismarck hit the right nail on the head.

A gigantic and magnificently organized party like the German Socialist Party has need of a no less gigantic apparatus of editors, secretaries, bookkeepers, and numerous other employees, whose sole task is to serve this colossal machine. Mutatis mutandis the same is true of the other great branch of the working-class movement, the trade-union organizations. Now, for the reasons that have previously been discussed, there are available for the service of the German labour movement no more than a very small number of refugees from the bourgeoisie. It is for this reason that most of the posts are filled by men of working-class origin, who by zeal and by study have succeeded in gaining the confidence of their comrades. It may, then, be said that there exists a proletarian élite which arises spontaneously by a process of natural selection within the Socialist Party, and that its members come to perform functions altogether different from those which they originally exercised. To make use of a phrase which is convenient and comprehensible, despite its lack of scientific precision, we may say that such men have abandoned manual work to become brainworkers. For those who make such a change considerable advantages accrue, altogether independent of the advantages which attach per se to mental work when compared to manual. The manual worker who has become an official of the Socialist Party is no longer in a position of strictly personal and purely mercenary dependence upon his employer or upon the manager of the factory; he has become a free man, engaged in intellectual work on behalf of an impersonal enterprise. Moreover, he is bound to this enterprise, not solely by his strongest material interests, but also by the powerful ties of the ideal and of solidarity in the struggle. And notwithstanding certain exceptions which may confuse the minds of the profane, he is treated far more humanely than by an private employer. In relation to the party the employee is not a simple wage-earner, but rather a profit-sharing associate—not, of course, a profitsharer in the industrial sense, since the party is not a commercial undertaking for the earning of dividends, but a profitsharer in the ideal sense. It is not suggested that the party employee earns his bread in the most pleasant way in the world. On the contrary, as has been said in earlier chapters, the daily bread, which with rare exceptions is not unduly plentiful, must be earned by the fulfilment of an enormous amount of labour, prematurely exhausting health and energy. Nevertheless the exmanual worker can live with dignity and comparative ease. Since he has a fixed salary, his position is more secure, and though outwardly more stormy, it is inwardly more tranquil, than that of the ordinary wage-earner. Should he be imprisoned, the party cares for him and his dependents, and the more often he is prosecuted the better become his chances of rapid advancement in his career of socialist official with all the advantages attaching to the position.

We may here consider the interesting question, What is the numerical ratio between the socialist bureaucracy and the organized masses; how many comrades are there for each party official? If we include in the term “official” all the mandataries of the party in the communes, etc., most of whom are unpaid, we sometimes attain to surprising results. For example, the socialist organization of the grand duchy of Baden, with a membership (1905) of 7,332, had more than 1,000 municipal councilors. [208] According to these figures, every seventh member of the Badenese party had the honor of being a party representative. This example, however, was quoted by the executive in its report to the congress of Jena precisely on account of its abnormality. Even though it may not be unique in southern Germany, it does not in truth bear upon the question we are now considering, which is the numerical relation between the enrolled membership and the party employees in the strict sense of the term, considered as a group of persons permanently and directly engaged in the service of the collectivity. The following figures give some idea of this ratio. According to a notice which in 1904 went the round of the German socialist press, [209] the party at that time employed, in addition to 1,476 persons engaged in the party printing establishment (about two-thirds of whom enjoyed the benefits of the eighthour day, while many also had the right to regular holidays), 329 individuals working on the editorial staff and as delivery agents. The daily socialist press had in 1909 a circulation of one million, while the trade-union journals, weekly for the most part, had a far higher circulation. [210] Alike in the trade unions and in the Socialist Party the number of paid employees is rapidly increasing. The first regularly appointed and paid leaders in the European labour movement were the officials nominated in 1840 by the English Ironfounders' Society. Today in the trade-union organizations of the United Kingdom there are more than one thousand salaried employees. [211] In Germany, in the year 1898, the number of trade-union officials was 104; in 1904 it was 677, of whom 100 belonged to the metal-workers and 70 to the bricklayers and mason's union. This increase in the officialdom is accelerated, not merely by the steady increase in the membership, but also by the increasing complexity of the benefits offered by the organizations. Almost every meeting of the central executives discusses and determines upon the appointment of new officials, rendered essential by the further differentiation of the trade-union functions. There are always found advocates for the creation of fresh specialized posts in the labour movement, to fulfil various technical offices, to keep abreast of new discoveries and advances in methods of manufacture, to check the returns made by factory employers, to act as economists and compile trade statistics.

For some years past the same tendency has been manifest in the German Socialist Party. According to the report of the executive for the year 1909, very many district organizations now employ salaried secretaries. The number of district secretaries is 43, while in a single year the number of secretaries of constituencies increased from 41 to 62. There is a mutual aid society for officials of the Socialist Party and of the trade unions, and its membership continually increases. In 1902 it had 433 members; in 1905, 1,095; in 1907, 1,871; and in 1909, 2,474. But there must be officials who are not members of the society.

When he abandons manual work for intellectual, the worker undergoes another transformation which involves his whole existence. He gradually leaves the proletariat to become a member of the petty bourgeois class. At first, as we have seen, there is no more than a change in his professional and economic situation. The salaries paid by the party, although modest, are distinctly greater than the average wage which the worker gained before his entry into the socialist bureaucracy, and are calculated to enable the recipients to lead a petty bourgeois life. In one of the German Socialist Congresses, Wilhelm Liebknecht apostrophized the other leaders in the following terms: “You are for the most part aristocrats among the workers — aristocrats, I mean, in respect of income. The workers in the Erzgebirge or the weavers of Silesia would regard the salaries you earn as the income of a Croesus. [212] It is true, at least in the majority of cases, that the career of the party or trade-union employee does not positively transform the ex-manual worker into a capitalist. Yet this career effects a notable elevation of the worker above the class to which he primarily belonged, and in Germany there is applied to the existence led by such persons the sociologically precise term of gehobene Arbeiterexistenz (a working-class life on a higher scale). Karl Marx himself did not hesitate to classify the working-class leaders under two heads, as höherklassige (workers of a superior class, intellectual workers) and Arbeiter (manual workers properly speaking). [213] As we shall show in fuller detail in a subsequent chapter, the manual worker of former days becomes a petty bourgeois or even a bourgeois. In addition to this metamorphosis, and despite his frequent contact with the mass of the workers, he undergoes a profound psychological transformation. The paid official, living at a higher social level, will not always possess the moral strength to resist the seductions of his new environment. His political and social education will seldom suffice to immunize him against the new influences. August Bebel repeatedly drew the attention of the party to the dangers by which the leaders were beset, the risks to their class purity and to their unity of thought. The proletarian party-officials, he said, are “persons whose life has become established upon a comparatively stable basis.” [214]

A closer examination will show that the phenomenon here considered has a profound social significance, and that neither within nor without the party has it hitherto received the attention it deserves. For the German workers, the labour movement has an importance analogous to that of the Catholic Church for certain fractions of the petty bourgeoisie and of the rural population. In both cases we have an organization which furnishes opportunities to the most intelligent members of certain classes to secure a rise in the social scale. In the Church, the peasants' son will often succeed in achieving social advance, whose equivalent in all the other liberal professions has remained the monopoly of members of the aristocracy of birth or of wealth. No one of peasant birth becomes a general or a prefect, but not a few peasants become bishops. Pope Pius X was of peasant origin. Now that which the Church offers to peasants and to petty bourgeois, namely, a facility for ascent in the social scale, is offered to intelligent manual workers by the socialist party.

As a source of social transformations the Socialist Party has many affinities with another institution, namely, the Prussian military organization. The son of a bourgeois family who adopts a permanent military career becomes a stranger to his own class. Should he attain to high rank, he will receive a title from the emperor. He loses his bourgeois characteristics and adopts the usages and opinions of his new feudal environment. It is true that these military officers are only manifesting the tendency to the attainment of “gentility” in which the whole bourgeoisie is involved, [215] but in their case this process is greatly accelerated, and is effected with a full consciousness of its consequences. Every year hundreds of young men from the upper and middle strata of the bourgeois class become officers in the army, simply from the desire to secure a higher position and more social consideration. In the Socialist Party a similar effect is often the result of necessity, the individual's social metamorphosis taking place independently of the will. But the general results are similar.

Thus the Socialist Party gives a lift to certain strata of the working class. The more extensive and the more complicated its bureaucratic mechanism, the more numerous are those raised by this machine above their original social position. It is the involuntary task of the Socialist Party to remove the proletariat, to deproletarianize, some of the most capable and best informed of its members. Now, according to the materialist conception of history, the social and economic metamorphosis gradually involves a metamorphosis in the realm of ideas. The consequence is that in many of the ex-workers this embourgeoisement is very rapidly effected. Naturally the change is less speedy in proportion as socialist theory is more deeply rooted in the mind of the individual. Numerous are those manual workers who, having attained a higher social and economic situation, none the less remain throughout their lives profoundly attached to the socialist cause. In this case, however, the ex-manual worker is, just like the ex-bourgeois socialist, an “ideologue,” since his mentality does not correspond to his position in society. Sometimes, again, the psychological metamorphosis we are considering is, as it were, inhibited by a tenacious and vigourous hereditary socialist mentality: here we see the children and grandchildren following their parents as whole-hearted combatants on behalf of the labour party, notwithstanding the elevated position to which they have attained. Experience shows, however, that such cases are exceptional. Even when the deproletarianized socialist remains a sincere advocate of proletarian emancipation, and grows gray in his position of socialist editor or deputy, his children, sons as well as daughters, are thoroughgoing members of the higher social class into which they have been removed by the improvement in their father's social position, and this not merely in the material sense, but in respect of their ideas, so that it becomes impossible to distinguish them from their fellow-bourgeois. In most cases the only bond which remains to attach the father to the working class, his faith in the politico-social dogma of socialism, is slackened in the son to become an absolute indifference and sometimes an open hostility to socialism. To sum up, it may be said that these former working-class people, considered as families and not as individuals, are absorbed sooner or later into the new bourgeois environment. The children receive a bourgeois education; they attend better schools than those to which their father had access; their interests are bourgeois and they very rarely recall the revolutionary and antibourgeois derivation of their own entrance into the bourgeoisie. The working-class families which have been raised by the revolutionary workers to a higher social position, for the purpose of a more effective struggle against the bourgeoisie, thus come before long to be fused with the bourgeoisie.

Reference has previously been made to a similar phenomenon in the case of the families of working-class leaders who are refugees from the class of bourgeois intellectuals. The final result is the same, the only difference being that the children of the ex-manual workers forget their class of origin, while the children of the bourgeois intellectuals recall it. The result is that in the history of the labour movement we may observe a similar irony to that which may be seen in the history of the bourgeois resistance to the workers. The bourgeoisie has not been able to prevent a number of the best instructed, most capable, and most adroit among its elements from placing themselves at the head of the mortal enemies of the bourgeoisie; it is often these ex-bourgeois who stimulate the proletarians to resistance and organize them for the struggle. The proletariat suffers a similar fate. In the severe struggle it has undertaken for the expropriation of the expropriators, it elevates from the depths of its own class those who have the finest intelligences and the keenest vision, by serious collective sacrifices gives them the pen to use in place of ruder tools, and in doing so it throws into the arms of the enemy those who have been selected with the express purpose of fighting the privileged class. If the chosen combatants do not themselves go over to the enemy, their children at least will do so. This is indeed a tragical destiny: ex-bourgeois on the one side, and ex-manual workers on the other. The imposing political contest between the classes representing respectively capital and labour ends, however paradoxical this may appear, in a manner analogous with that which in the sphere of economic competition is determined through the operation of supply and demand, speculation, personal adroitness, etc.—in a social exchange among the classes. It is hardly necessary to repeat that this interchange of the ripples on the surface of the waves does not weaken, and far less annul, the profundity of social antagonisms. It is obvious that the process of social exchange can on either side effect no more than infinitesimal minorities. But it affects the most influential, and herein lies its sociological importance. It affects the self-made leaders.

3. Capitalist Defense as the Creator of New Petty Bourgeois Strata.

The embourgeoisement of certain strata of the working-class party has other factors in addition to the influence of the bureaucratic apparatus of the Socialist Party, the trade unions, and the cooperative societies. This development, which is a necessary characteristic of every movement towards emancipation, is to a certain extent paralleled by the constitution of a petty bourgeoisie of strongly proletarian characteristics, itself also developed from below upwards, itself also an accessory phenomenon of the struggle of the organized workers for social emancipation, but which takes place outside the various forms of socialist organization. We allude to those proletarian elements which become particularly numerous in times of crisis, when the labour organizations are still weak and persecuted, as was the case in Germany during the days of the antisocialist law. At such times numerous proletarians are victimized, it may be on account of their passive fidelity to party or trade union, it may be because their attitude is frankly socialist and “subversive.” Forced by necessity, these victims of capitalist reprisals have no other resource than to adopt some form of independent enterprise. Abandoning their ancient handicraft, they open a small shop, fruit and vegetables, stationery, grocery, or tobacco; they become pedlars, keep a coffee-stall, or the like. In most cases their ancient associates support them with admirable solidarity, regarding it as a duty to assist these unfortunate comrades by giving them their custom. It sometimes happens that some of these new petty bourgeois find their way definitely into the middle class. Thus capitalist resistance has automatically created new strata of petty bourgeois.

In addition to these victims of the struggle for proletarian emancipation, there are not a few workers who leave their class, not from necessity, but influenced to a large extent by the love of speculation and the desire to improve their social position. Thus there has come into existence a whole army of ex-proletarians, petty bourgeois and small shopkeepers, who all claim, in virtue of a superior moral right, that the comrades must support them by dealing exclusively at their establishments. The mode of life of these small traders often reduces them, despite all their good wishes, to the level of social parasites; their command of capital being extremely small, the goods they offer to their customers, that is to say to the organized workers, are both bad and dear.

Still more important in German socialism is the rôle of those who are termed Parteibudiger, that is to say tavern-keepers who are members of the party. During the prevalence of the anti-socialist law their political mission was of incontestable importance. In many small towns the tavern-keepers belonging to the party still exercise multifarious and important functions. It is in their houses that the executive committee meets; often these are the only places where socialist and trade-union journals are found on the tables; and in many cases, since the owners of other halls are hostile or timid, it is here alone that public meetings can be held. In a word, they are necessary instruments in the local socialist struggle. In the more important centers, however, these places, with their unhygienic environment, become a veritable curse to the party. It may be added that the brutal struggle for existence leads the petty bourgeois tavern-keepers to exercise improper pressure upon the socialist organizations. They enjoy a considerable influence among the comrades, and this pressure is commonly exerted in a manner directly injurious to the interests of the proletariat. The attempts which have been made in Germany, especially since 1890, to induce the workers to abandon the unwholesome rooms of the old taverns and to frequent the great modern establishments with fine airy halls, have led, as was inevitable, to “a vigourous opposition” on the part of the socialist tavern-keepers. [216] For many years the members of the party whose living is made by the sale of drink have energetically resisted the foundation of “People's Houses”; notwithstanding the sympathy for such institutions they may theoretically possess, they dread this new form of competition, and act in accordance with their immediate personal interests. In most cases their opposition has proved ineffectual. Not always, however. Even to-day there exist German towns with from twenty thousand to thirty thousand inhabitants in which the existence of a Parteikneipe (which despite its name of “Party tavern” is the exclusive property of some individual member of the party) has proved an insuperable obstacle in the way of the local labour organizations when they have desired to build a place of their own, or even to obtain from other and nonsocialist inkeepers the use of a more commodious hall for their meetings.

For an additional reason, these socialist taverns are calamitous in their influence upon the party, in that they oppose a potent obstacle to the extension of the temperance movement which has been initiated during recent years. It is no secret in socialist circles that long before the congress of Essen (1907) the party would have declared openly against alcoholism, and that after this congress it would have applied its decisions with greater vigour, had not the party leaders been restrained by the fear that the measures recommended, and even a simple temperance propaganda, would react injuriously upon the interests of an influential category of the members of the party.

It is impossible to determine with any accuracy the number of individuals who have become independent petty bourgeois as the outcome of the struggles of the workers and the political reprisals of the employers. Tobacconists, grocers, etc., elude statistical investigation. The only definite information we possess relates to tavernkeepers. In the parliamentary group we find that in 1892, of 35 socialist deputies, 4 were publicans (11.4%); in 1903, of 58 socialist deputies, 5 were publicans (8.6%); and in 1906, of 81 socialist deputies, 6 were publicans (7.4%). In the local socialist sections, the proportion of tavern-keepers is considerable. At Leipzig, in 1887, there were 30 Partiekneipen. In 1900, among the socialist branches of the Leipzig country districts with 4,855 members there were 84 restaurant-keepers and publicans (1.7%); in Leipzig city, where the socialists numbered 1,681, there were in 1900, 47 tavernkeepers, and in 1905, 63 (3.4%). Offenbach, in 1905, 1 668 members, 74 publicans and 2 retailers of bottled beer (4.6%). Munich, in 1906, 6,704 members; milkretailers, tobacconists, sellers of cheese, etc., and publicans (wine merchants not included), 369 (5.5%). Frankfort-on-the-Main, in 1906, 2,620 members, 25 publicans (12 retailers of bottled beer and tobacconists excluded—approximately 1% ). Marburg, in 1906, 114 members, 2 publicans (1.8%). Reinickendorf-Ost, near Berlin, in 1906, 303 members, 18 tavernand restaurant-keepers (5.9%). These figures serve to show that in certain towns there is a socialist publican for every twenty members. Since the socialist publican depends mainly upon socialist customers, it follows that these twenty comrades must provide the chief financial resources of the enterprise.

The best proof of the numerical strength and the importance of this category of the members of the party is that they have founded at Berlin a powerful association, the Berlin League of Socialist Publicans and Innkeepers. It must not be forgotten that this association has largely come into existence from the consideration that the socialist publicans have other political tasks to fulfil from those which devolve upon their “bourgeois” colleagues, nor can it be denied that its members constitute a category of chosen socialists of tried fidelity, who have rendered important services to the party in its political campaigns and agitations, and whose socialist clientele is actuated by a high spirit of solidarity in giving these comrades its custom. It is inevitable, however, that the existence of such an organization, which represents peculiar economic interests, should in certain cases involve inconveniences, not merely for its competitors, the bourgeois publicans, but also for the socialist comrades, and that it should tend to assume the aspect of a party within the party. In the summer of 1906, the increase in the cost of production of beer, which resulted from new taxation by which the breweries were especially hard hit, led the publicans to raise the price to the consumers. Thereupon the German workers in a great many towns protested most energetically, and declared what was known as the “beer war,” boycotting certain breweries and the publicans who had raised the price—an agitation which led certain foreign socialists to observe sarcastically that you may take anything from the German worker except his beer. In this struggle, which was in many places conducted with great obstinacy, the organized workers encountered resistance from a notable proportion of socialist publicans. These, adopting a tactical outlook estranged from socialist principles, endeavoured to alarm the comrades by insisting upon the dangers of their campaign, and by predicting that if the consumers should succeed in forcing the producers to bear the new taxes, the government, delighted to find that these taxes were not pressing upon the masses of the people but were borne only by a restricted class of brewers and factory owners, would hasten to introduce new and yet heavier taxation, which could not fail to affect the consumers.

To sum up, it may be said that the petty bourgeois of proletarian origin, although the conditions of their life are not as a rule notably better than those of the proletarian strata from which they derive, constitute in more than one respect, on account of the particular interests they represent, a serious obstacle to the forward march of the working class legions. Moreover, it has to be remembered that the influence of this new stratum impresses upon the party from the mental point of view (in consequence of the new place which these elements occupy in the general economic process) a markedly petty bourgeois stamp.

4. CHAPTER IV
THE NEED FOR THE DIFFERENTIATION OF THE WORKING CLASS

EVERY individual member of the working class cherishes the hope of rising into a higher social sphere which will guarantee to him a better and less restricted existence. The workman's ideal is to become a petty bourgeois. [217] To noninitiates and to superficial observers the working-class members of the socialist parties seem always to be petty bourgeois. The proletariat has not been able to emancipate itself psychically from the social environment in which it lives. For example, the German worker, as his wages have increased, has acquired the disease which is in the blood of the German petty bourgeoisie, the club-mania. In every large town, and not a few small ones, there is a swarm of working-class societies: gymnastic clubs, choral societies, dramatic societies; even smokers' clubs, bowling clubs, rowing clubs, athletic clubs—all sorts of associations whose essentially petty bourgeois character is not destroyed by the fact that they sail under socialist colors. A bowling club remains a bowling club even if it assumes the pompous name of "Sons of Freedom Bowling Club."

Just as little as the bourgeoisie can the socialist workers be regarded as a great homogeneous gray mass, although this consideration does not modify the fact that since proletarians all live by the sale of their only commodity, labour, the organized socialist workers are, at least in theory, conscious of their own unity in their common opposition to the owners of the means of production and to the governmental representatives of these. Yet it cannot be denied that the actual system of manufacture which unites under the same roof all the different categories of workers employed in a modern establishment for the production of railway-carriages, for instance, does not serve to overthrow the barriers which separate the various subclasses of workers. [218] Nor is it less true, looking at the matter from the other side, that there exists among the workers the sense of a need for differentiation which will readily escape those who do not come in personal contact with them. The kind of work, the rate of wages, differences of race and climate, produce numerous shades of difference alike in the mode of life and in the tastes of the workers. As early as 1860 it was said: “Entre ouvriers il y a des catégories et un classement aristocratique. Les imprimeurs prennent la tête; les chiffonniers, les vidangeurs, les égoutiers ferment la marche.” [219] Between the compositor and the casual labourer in the same country there exist differences in respect of culture and of social and economic status more pronounced than those between the compositor in one country and the small manufacturer in another. [220] The discrepancy between the different categories of workers is plainly displayed even in the trade-union movement. We know, for example, that the policy of the compositors' unions in Germany, France, and Italy differs from that of the other unions, and also from that of the Socialist Party, exhibiting a tendency towards the right, being more opportunist and more accommodating. In Germany, the compositors' union has for its president a Rexhauser, and in France a Keufer. We observe, too, in the conduct of the diamond-workers in Holland and in Belgium the same unsocialistic, unproletarian, and particularist tendencies. The aristocratic element of the working class, the best paid, those who approximate most closely to the bourgeoisie, pursue tactics of their own. In the active work of the labour movement, the division of the organized masses into different social strata is often plainly manifest. Working-class history abounds in examples showing how certain fractions or categories of the proletariat have, under the influence of interests peculiar to their sub-class, detached themselves from the great army of labour and made common cause with the bourgeoisie. Thus it happens, generally speaking, that the workers in armaments factories have little sympathy with anti-militarist views. At the London congress of the Independent Labor Party in 1910, the Woolwich delegate, largely representing the view of the employees at Woolwich arsenal, expressed strong dissent from the opinion of those delegates who had brought forward a resolution in favor of a restriction of armaments and of compulsory arbitration in international disputes. [221] Again, the check which was sustained at Venice by the general strike of protest against the Tripolitan campaign was due to the opposition of a section of the arsenal workers. [222] The very fact that the cessation of work on May 1st is but a partial demonstration renders it possible to divide the workers into two classes. One consists of those who thanks to better conditions of life and other favorable circumstances “can allow themselves the luxury” of celebrating the 1st of May; the other comprises those who by poverty or ill-fortune are compelled to remain at work. [223]

The need for differentiation is manifested still more clearly when we consider more extended groups of workers. The difference between skilled and unskilled workers is primarily and predominantly economic, and displays itself in a difference of working conditions. As time passes, this difference becomes transformed into a veritable class distinction. The skilled and better paid workers hold aloof from the unskilled and worse paid workers. The former are always organized, while the latter remain “free” labourers; and the fierce economic and social struggles which occur between the two groups constitute one of the most interesting phenomena of modern social history. This struggle, which by the physiologist Angelo Mosso is termed ergomachia, the struggle for the feeding-ground, [224] is waged with ever-increasing intensity. The organized workers demand from the unorganized the strictest solidarity, and insist that the latter should abandon work whenever they themselves are in conflict with the employers. When this demand is not immediately complied with, they insult the unorganized workers by the use of approbrious names which have found a place in scientific terminology. In France, in the days of Louis Philippe, they were called bourmont and ragusa. At the present day they are in Germany termed Streikbrecher; in Italy, krumiri; in England, blacklegs; in America, scabs; in Hainault, gambes de bos; in France, jaunes, renards, or bédouins; in Holland, onderkruipers; and so on. It is incontestable that the grievances of the organized workers against the unorganized are largely justified. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that in the working class this ergomachia is not essentially the outcome of differences between the well-disposed workers and the ill-disposed, as masters and men naively believe, of course inverting the roles. For the socialists, in fact, the strikers are always heroes and the strike-breakers are always villains; whilst for the employers the strike-breakers are honest and hardworking fellows, whilst the strikers are idle good-for-nothings. In reality, ergomachia does not consist of a struggle between two categories distinguished by ethical characteristics, but is for the most part a war between the better-paid workers and the poorer strata of the proletariat. The latter, from the economic aspect, consist of those who are still economically unripe for a struggle with the employers to secure higher wages. We often hear the most poverty-stricken workers, conscious of their inferiority, content that their wages are high enough, whilst the better paid and organized workers declare that the unorganized are working at starvation rates. One of the most indefatigable of French socialist women has well said: “On est presque tenté d'excuser les trahisons de ces supplanteurs, quand on a vu, de ses propres yeux vu, tout le tragique du problème des sans-travail en Angleterre. Dans les grands ports du sud ou de l'ouest, on voit rangés, le long d'un mur de quaie, des milliers et des milliers d'affamés, à la figure hâve, grelottants, qui espèrent se faire embaucher comme débardeurs. Il en faut quelques dizaines. Quand les portes s'ouvrent, c'est une terrible ruée, une véritable bataille. Récemment, un de ces hommes, les côtes pressés, mourut étouffé dans la mêlée.” [225] The organized workers, on their side, do not consider themselves obliged to exhibit solidarity towards the unorganized, even when they are all sharing a common poverty during crises of unemployment. The German trades councils often demand that the subsidies which (in accordance with the so-called Strasburg system) are provided in certain large towns from the public funds to render assistance in cases of unemployment, should be reserved for the organized workers, declaring that the unorganized have no claim to assistance. [226]

The more fortunate workers do not only follow their natural inclination to fight by all available means against their less well-to-do comrades, who, by accepting lower wages, threaten the higher standard of life of the organized workers—using in the struggle, as always happens when economic interests conflict, methods which disregard every ethical principle. They also endeavour to hold themselves completely aloof. The union button is often, as it were, a patent of nobility which distinguishes its wearer from the plebs. This happens even when the unorganized workers would like nothing better than to make common cause with the organized. In almost all the larger British and American trade unions there is manifest a tendency to corporatism, to the formation of sharply distinguished working-class aristocracies. [227] The trade unions, having become rich and powerful, no longer seek to enlarge their membership, but endeavour rather to restrict it by imposing a high entrance fee, by demanding a certificate of prolonged apprenticeship, and by other similar means, all deliberately introduced in order to retain certain privileges in their own hands at the expense of other workers following the same occupation. The anti-alien movement is the outcome of the same professional egoism, and is especially conspicuous among the Americans and Australians, who insist upon legislation to forbid the immigration of foreign workers. The trade unions in such cases adopt a frankly “nationalist” policy. In order to keep out the “undesirables” they do not hesitate to appeal for aid to the “class-state,” and they exercise upon the government a pressure which may lead their country to the verge of war with the labour-exporting land. [228] In Europe, too, we may observe, although here to a less degree, the formation within the labour movement of closed groups and coteries (and it is in this that the tendency to oligarchy consist), which arise in direct conflict with the theoretical principles of socialism. The workers employed at the Naples arsenal, who recently demanded of the government that “a third of the new places to be filled should be allotted to the sons of existing employees who are following their fathers' trade,” [229] are in sentiment by no means so remote from the world of our day as might at first be imagined. As has been well said, “la lutte de classe a pour objectif de faire monter la classe inférieure au niveau de la supérieure, c'est ainsi que les révolutions réussissent souvent, non à dèmocratiser les eugéniques, mais à eugéniser les démocrats.” [230]

The policy of social reform, which finds its most definite expression in labour legislation, does not entail the same advantages for all sections of the working class. For example, the law which raises the minimum age of the factory worker will have varying effects according as may vary the power of the labour organizations, the rate of wages, the conditions of the labour market, etc., in the different branches of industry or agriculture. Thus in certain categories of workers the effect of the law will be a transient depression of the standard of life, whilst in other cases it will lead to a permanent elevation in that standard. There results an even greater accentuation of the differentiation which the proletarian groupings already present as the outcome of national, local, and technical differences.

To sum up, it may be affirmed that in the contemporary working class there is already manifest a horizontal stratification. Within the quatrième état we see already the movements of the embryonic cinquième état. One of the greatest dangers to the socialist movement, and one which must not be lightly disregarded as impossible, is that gradually there may come into existence a number of different strata of workers, as the outcome of the influence of a general increase of social wealth, in conjunction with the efforts made by the workers themselves to elevate their standard of life; this may in many cases enable them to secure a position in which, though they may not completely lose the common human feeling of never being able to get enough, from which even millionaires are not altogether exempt, they will become so far personally satisfied as to be gradually estranged from the ardent revolutionary aspirations of the masses towards a social system utterly different from our own — aspirations born of privation. Thus the working class will become severed into two unequal parts, subject to perpetual fluctuations in their respective size.

5. CHAPTER V
LABOUR LEADERS OF PROLETARIAN ORIGIN

ATTEMPTS have not been lacking to solve the insoluble problem, how to obviate the leaders' dominion over the led. Among such attempts, there is one which is made with especial frequency, and which is advocated with considerable heat, to exclude all intellectuals from leadership in the working-class movement. This proposal reflects the dislike for the intellectuals which, in varying degrees, has been manifested in all countries and at all times. It culminates in the artificial creation of authenticated working-class leaders, and is based upon certain general socialist dogmas, mutilated or imperfectly understood, or interpreted with undue strictness — on an appeal, for instance, to the principle enunciated at the constitutive congress of the first International held at Geneva in 1866, that the emancipation of the workers can be effected only by the workers themselves.

Above all, however, such proposals are based upon an alleged greater kinship between the leaders of proletarian origin and the proletarians they lead. The leaders who have themselves been manual workers are, we are told, more closely allied to the masses in their mode of thought, understand the workers better, experience the same needs as these, and are animated by the same desires. There is a certain amount of truth in this, inasmuch as the ex-worker cannot only speak with more authority than the intellectual upon technical questions relating to his former occupation, but has a knowledge of the psychology and of the material details of working-class life derived from personal experience. It is unquestionably true that in the leaders of proletarian origin, as compared with the intellectuals, we see conspicuously exhibited the advantages of leadership as well as the disadvantages, since the proletarian commonly possesses a more precise understanding of the psychology of the masses, knows better how to deal with the workers. From this circumstance the deduction is sometimes made that the ex-worker, when he has become immersed in the duties of political leadership, will continue to preserve a steady and secure contact with the rank and file, that he will choose the most practicable routes, and that his own proletarian experiences will afford a certain safeguard against his conducting the masses into regions and bypaths from which they are by nature totally estranged.

The central feature of the syndicalist theory is found in the demand for direct action on the part of the trade union, enfranchised from the tutelage of socialist leaders predominantly bourgeois in origin, the union being self-sufficient and responsible to itself alone. Direct action means that the proletariat is to pursue its aims without the intermediation of parliamentary representation. Syndicalism is described as the apotheosis of proletarian autonomy. Everything is to be effected by the energy, initiative, and courage of individual workers. The organized proletariat is to consist of an army of franctireurs, disembarrassed of the impotent general staff of effete socialist bureaucrats, unhampered, autonomous, and sovereign. [231] Passing, however, from fiction to fact, we find that the most substantial difference between syndicalism and political socialism, apart from questions of tactics, is to be found in a difference of social origin in the leaders of the respective tendencies. The trade union is governed by persons who have themselves been workers, and from this the advocates of syndicalism infer, by a bold logical leap, that the policy of the leaders of working-class origin must necessarily coincide with the policy of the proletariat. [232]

The syndicalist leaders are to be, both in the intellectual and moral sense, chosen manual workers. [233] The leader of working-class origin is regarded as the Messiah who will cure all the ills of proletarian organization; he is, in any case, the best of all possible leaders.

It is hardly necessary to point out that it is an illusion to imagine that by entrusting its affairs to proletarian leaders the proletariat will control these affairs more directly than if the leaders are lawyers or doctors. In both cases, all action is effected through intermediaries. In the modern labour movement it is impossible for the leader to remain in actual fact a manual worker. Directly a trade union selects one of the comrades in the factory to minister regularly to the collective interests in return for a definite salary, this comrade is, consciously or not, lifted out of the working class into a new class, that of the salaried employees. The proletarian leader has ceased to be a manual worker, not solely in the material sense, but psychologically and economically as well. It is not merely that he has ceased to quarry stones or to sole shoes, but that he has become an intermediary just as much as his colleagues in leadership, the lawyer and the doctor. In other words, as delegate and representative, the leader of proletarian origin is subject to exactly the same oligarchical tendencies as is the bourgeois refugee who has become a labour leader. The manual worker of former days is henceforward a déclassé.

Among all the leaders of the working class, it is the tradeunion leaders who have been most sympathetically treated in the literature of the social sciences. This is very natural. Books are written by men of science and men of letters. Such persons are, as a rule, more favorably disposed towards the leaders of the trade-union movement than towards the leaders of the political labour movement, for the former do not, as do so often the latter, encroach upon the writer's field of activity, nor disturb his circle of ideas with new and intrusive theories. It is for this reason that often in the same learned volume we find praise of the trade-union leader side by side with blame of the socialist leader.

It has been claimed that service as buffers between employers and employed has led in the leaders to the development of admirable and precious qualities; adroitness and scrupulousness, patience and energy, firmness of character and personal honesty. It has even been asserted that they are persons of an exceptionally chaste life, and this characteristic has been attributed to the comparative absence of sexual desires which, in accordance with the law of psychological compensation discovered by Guglielmo Ferrero, is supposed to characterize all persons exceptionally devoted to duty. [234] Two qualities in which most of the trade-union leaders unquestionably excel are objective gravity and individual good sense (often united with a lack of interest in and understanding of wider problems), derived from the exceptionally keen sense they have of direct personal responsibility, and in part perhaps from the dry and predominantly technical and administrative quality of their occupations. The tradeunion leaders have been deliberately contrasted with the verbal revolutionists who guide the political labour movement, men of the type of the loquacious Rabagas in Sardou's play, and, not without exaggeration, there has been ascribed to the former a sound political sense which is supposed to be lacking in the latter—an insight into the extraordinary complexity of social and economic life and a keen understanding of the politically practicable. The nucleus of truth which such observations contain is that the trade-union leaders (leaving out of consideration for the present those of syndicalist tendency) differ in many respects from the leaders of political socialism.

Among the trade-union leaders themselves, however, there are great differences, corresponding to the different phases of the trade-union movement. The qualities requisite for the leadership of an organization whose finances are still weak, and which devotes itself chiefly to propaganda and strikes, must necessarily differ from those requisite for the leadership of a trade union supplying an abundance of solid benefits and aiming above all at peaceful practical results. In the former case the chief requisites are enthusiasm and the talents of the preacher. The work of the organizer is closely analogous to that of the rebel or the apostle. According to certain critics, these qualities may well be associated, above all in the early days of the proletarian movement, with the crassest ignorance. During this period, propaganda is chiefly romantic and sentimental, and its objective is moral rather than material. Very different is it when the movement is more advanced. The great complexity of the duties which the trade union has now to fulfil and the increasing importance assumed in the life of the union by financial, technical, and administrative questions, render it necessary that the agitator should give place to the employee equipped with technical knowledge. The commercial traveler in the class struggle is replaced by the strict and prosaic bureaucrat, the fervent idealist by the cold materialist, the democrat whose convictions are (at least in theory) absolutely firm by the conscious autocrat. Oratorical activity passes into the background, for administrative aptitudes are now of the first importance. Consequently, in this new period, while the leadership of the movement is less noisy, less brilliant, and less glorious, it is of a far more solid character, established upon a much sounder practical competence. The leaders are now differentiated from the mass of their followers, not only by their personal qualities as specialists endowed with insight and mastery of routine, but in addition by the barrier of the rules and regulations which guide their own actions and with the aid of which they control the rank and file. The rules of the German federation of metal-workers occupy forty-seven printed pages and are divided into thirty-nine paragraphs, each consisting of from ten to twelve sections. Where is the workman who would not lose himself in such a labyrinth? The modern trade-union official, above all if he directs a federation, must have precise knowledge of a given branch of industry, and must know how at any moment to form a sound estimate of the comparative forces of his own organization and the adversaries'. He must be equally well acquainted with the technical and with the economic side of the industry. He must know the cost of manufacture of the commodities concerned, the source and cost of the raw materials, the state of the markets, the wages and conditions of the workers in different regions. He must possess the talents at once of a general and those of a diplomatist.

These excellent qualities of the trade-union leader are not always compatible with the democratic regime, and indeed they often conflict unmistakably with the conditions of this regime.

It is especially in the ex-manual worker that the love of power manifests itself with the greatest intensity. Having just succeeded in throwing off the chains he wore as a wage-labourer and a vassal of capital, he is least of all disposed to induce new chains which will bind him as a slave of the masses. Like all freedmen, he has a certain tendency to abuse his newly acquired freedom—a tendency to libertinage. In all countries we learn from experience that the working-class leader of proletarian origin is apt to be capricious and despotic. He is extremely loath to tolerate contradiction. This trait is doubtless partly dependent upon his character as parvenu, for it is in the nature of the parvenu to maintain his authority with extreme jealousy, to regard all criticism as an attempt to humiliate him and to diminish his importance, as a deliberate and ill-natured allusion to his past. Just as the converted Jew dislikes references to bis Hebrew birth, so also the labour leader of proletarian origin dislikes any references to his state of dependence and his position as an employee.

Nor must it be forgotten that, like all self-made men, the trade-union leader is intensely vain. Although he commonly possesses extensive knowledge of material details, he lacks general culture and a wide philosophical view, and is devoid of the secure self-confidence of the born leader; for these reasons he is apt to show himself less resistant than he should be towards the interested and amiable advances of bourgeois notables. In a letter to Sorge, Engels wrote of England: [235] “The most repulsive thing in this country is the bourgeois 'respectability' which has invaded the very blood and bone of the workers. The organization of society into firmly established hierarchical gradations, in which each one has his proper pride, but also an inborn respect for his 'betters' and 'superiors,' is taken so much as a matter of course, is so ancient and traditional, that it is comparatively easy for the bourgeois to play the part of seducers. For example, I am by no means sure that John Burns is not prouder in the depths of his soul of his popularity with Cardinal Manning, the Lord Mayor, and the bourgeoisie in general, than of his popularity among his own class. Even Tom Mann, whom I regard as the best of these leaders of working-class origin, is glad to talk of how he went to lunch with the Lord Mayor.” In Germany, one of the few “class-conscious” German workers who have come into personal contact with William II did not venture in the royal presence to give expression to his convictions or to manifest his fidelity to the principles of his party. [236] There already exists in the proletariat an extensive stratum consisting of the directors of cooperative societies, the secretaries of trade unions, the trusted leaders of various organizations, whose psychology is entirely modeled upon that of the bourgeois classes with whom they associate.

The new environment exercises a potent influence upon the ex-manual worker. His manners become gentler and more refined. In his daily association with persons of the highest birth he learns the usages of good society and endeavours to assimilate them. Not infrequently the working-class deputies endeavour to mask the change which has occurred. The socialist leaders, and the same is true of the Democratic-Christians and the trade-union leaders, if of working-class origin, when speaking to the masses like to describe themselves as working men. By laying stress upon their origin, upon the characteristics they share with the rank and file, they ensure a good reception and inspire affection and confidence. During the elections of 1848 in France it was the mode for candidates to speak of themselves as ouvriers. This was not simply a title of honor, but also a title which helped to success. No less than twenty-one of these ouvriers thus secured election. The real signification of this title may be learned from a study of the list of candidates presented by the modern Socialist Party in France, Italy, and, elsewhere; here we find that a master-tinsmith (a man who keeps a shop and is therefore a petty bourgeois) describes himself as a “tinker,” and so on. It even happens that the same candidate will describe himself as a workman in an electoral address intended for working-class readers, and as an employer in an appeal to the bourgeoisie. When they have entered Parliament, some of the ex-manual workers continue, more or less ostentatiously, to differentiate themselves by their dress from their bourgeois colleagues. But it is not by such external signs of a proletarian origin that they can hope to prevent the internal change, which was described by Jaures (before his own adhesion to socialism) in the following terms: “Les députés ouvriers qui arrivent au Parlement s'embourgeoisent vite, au mauvais sens du mot; ils perdent leur sève et leur énergie première, et il ne leur reste plus qu'une sorte de sentimentalité de tribune.” [237]

Inspired with a foolish self-satisfaction, the ex-worker is apt to take pleasure in his new environment, and he tends to become indifferent and even hostile to all progressive aspirations in the democratic sense. He accommodates himself to the existing order, and ultimately, weary of the struggle, becomes even reconciled to that order. [238] What interest for them has now the dogma of the social revolution? Their own social revolution has already been effected. At bottom, all the thoughts of these leaders are concentrated upon the single hope that there shall long continue to exist a proletariat to choose them as its delegates and to provide them with a livelihood. Consequently they contend that what is above all necessary is to organize, to organize unceasingly, and that the cause of the workers will not gain the victory until the last worker has been enrolled in the organization. Like all the beati possidentes, they are poor fighters. They incline, as in England, to a theory in accordance with which the workers and the capitalists are to be united in a kind of league, and to share, although still unequally, in the profits of a common enterprise. Thus the wages of the labourers become dependent upon the returns of the business. This doctrine, based upon the principle of what is known as the sliding-scale, throws a veil over all existing class-antagonisms and impresses upon labour organizations a purely mercantile and technical stamp. If a struggle becomes inevitable, the leader undertakes prolonged negotiations with the enemy; the more protracted these negotiations, the more often is his name repeated in the newspapers and by the public. If he continues to express “reasonable opinions,” he may be sure of securing at once the praise of his opponents and (in most cases) the admiring gratitude of the crowd.

Personal egoism, pusillanimity, and baseness are often associated with a fund of good sense and wide knowledge, and so intimately associated that a distinction of the good qualities from the bad becomes a difficult matter. The hotheads, who are not lacking among the labour leaders of proletarian origin, become cool. They have acquired a conscientious conviction that it would be a mistake to pursue an aggressive policy, which would in their view not merely fail to bring any profit, but would endanger the results hitherto attained. Thus in most cases two orders of motives are in operation, the egoistic and the objective, working hand in hand. The resultant of these influences is that state of comparative calm proper to the labour leader, regarding which an employee of one of the trade unions has expressed himself with great frankness: “It is no matter for reproach, but is perfectly comprehensible, that when we were all still working at the bench and had to get along as best we could with our small wages, we had a keener personal interest in a speedy change of the existing social order than we have in our present conditions.” [239] Such a state of mind will be yet further reinforced if the former manual worker should be, as he often is, engaged in journalistic work. Although in most cases he will with admirable diligence have amassed a considerable amount of knowledge, he has not had the necessary preliminary training to enable him to assemble, re-elabourate, and assimilate the elements of his knowledge to constitute a scientific doctrine, or even to create for himself a system of directive ideas. Consequently his personal inclinations towards quietism cannot be neutralized, as unquestionably happens in the case of many Marxists, by the preponderate energy of a comprehensive theory. Marx long ago recognized this defect in proletarian leaders, saying: “When the workers abandon manual labour to become professional writers, they almost always make a mess of the theoretical side.” [240]

We see, then, that the substitution of leaders of proletarian origin for those of bourgeois origin offers the working-class movement no guarantee, either in theory or in practice, against the political or moral infidelity of the leaders. In 1848, when the elections ordered by the provisional government took place in France, eleven of the deputies who entered the Chamber were members of the working class. No less than ten of these promptly abandoned the labour program on the strength of which they had been elected. [241] A yet more characteristic example is furnished by the history of the leaders of the Italian branch of the International (1868-79). Here the leaders, who were for the most part derived from the bourgeoisie and the nobility, nearly all showed themselves to be persons of distinguished worth. The only two exceptions were men of working-class origin. Stefano Caporusso, who spoke of himself as “the model working-man,” embezzled the funds of the socialist group of Naples, of which he was the president; while Carlo Terzaghi, president of the section of Turin, turned out to be a police spy and was expelled from the party. [242] Speaking generally, we learn from the history of the labour movement that a socialist party is exposed to the influence of the political environment in proportion to the degree in which it is genuinely proletarian in character. The first deputy of the Italian Socialist Party (which at that time consisted exclusively of manual workers), Antonio Maffi, a type-founder, elected to parliament in 1882, speedily joined one of the bourgeois sections of the left, declaring that his election as a working man did not make it necessary for him to set himself in opposition to the other classes of society. [243] In France, the two men who under the Second Empire had been the leaders of the Proudhonists, Henri Louis Tolain, the engraver, and Fribourg, the compositor and who at the first international congress in Geneva (1866) had urgently advocated an addition to the rules to effect the exclusion of all intellectuals and bourgeois from the organization, when the Commune was declared in 1871 ranged themselves on the side of Thiers, and were therefore expelled from the International as traitors. It may be added that Tolain ended his career as a senator under the conservative republic. Odger, the English labour leader, a member of the general council of the International, abandoned this body after the insurrection in Paris. It is true that he was in part influenced in this direction by his objection to the dictatorial methods of Marx. But Marx could rejoin, not without reason, that Odger had wished merely to make use of the International to acquire the confidence of the masses, and that he was ready to turn his back upon socialism as soon as it seemed to him an obstacle to his political career. A similar case was that of Lucraft, also on the general council of the International, who secured an appointment as school inspector under the British government. [244] In a word, it may be said that when the forces of the workers are led against the bourgeoisie by men of working-class origin, the attack is always less vigourous and conducted in a way less accordant with the alleged aims of the movement than when the leaders of the workers spring from some other class. A French critic, referring to the political conduct of the working-class leaders of the proletariat, declares that alike intellectually and morally they are inferior to the leaders of bourgeois origin, lacking the education and the culture which these possess. The same writer declares that the behavior of many of the leaders of working-class origin cannot fail to contribute to the intensive culture of antiparliamentarist tendencies. “Après le règne de la féodalité, nous avons eu le règne de la bourgeoisie. Après le bourgeois, aurons-nous le contremaître?—Notre ennemi, c'est notre maître, a dit La Fontaine. Mais le maître le plus redoubtable, c'est celui qui sort de nos rangs et qui, à force de mensonges et de roublardises, a su s'élever jusqu'au pouvoir.” [245]

It was hoped that the energetic entry of the proletariat upon the world-stage would have an ethically regenerative influence, that the new elements would exercise a continuous and unwearied control over the public authorities, and that (endowed with a keen sense of responsibility) they would strictly control the working of their own organizations. These anticipations have been disappointed by the oligarchical tendencies of the workers themselves. As Cesare Lombroso pointed out without contradiction in an article published in the central organ of the Italian Socialist Party, the more the proletariat approximates to the possession of the power and the wealth of the bourgeoisie, the more does it adopt all the vices of its opponent and the more does it become an instrument of corruption. “Then there arise all those subdivisions of our socalled popular parties, which have all the vices of the bourgeois parties, which claim and often possess a prestige among the people, and which easily become the tools of governmental corruption sailing under liberal colors in their name.” [246] We have sufficient examples in European history, even in that of very recent date, of the manner in which the artificial attempt to retain the party leadership in proletarian hands has led to a political misoneism against which the organized workers of all countries have every reason to be on their guard. The complaint so frequently voiced by the rank and file of the socialists that almost all the defects of the movement arise from the flooding of the proletarian party with bourgeois elements are merely the outcome of ignorance of the historical characteristics of the period through which we are now passing.

The leaders of the democratic parties do not present everywhere the same type, for the complex of tendencies by which they are influenced necessarily varies in accordance with environment, national character, climate, historical tradition, etc.

The United States of America is the land of the almighty dollar. In no other country in the world does public life seem to be dominated to the same extent by the thirst for gold. The unrestricted power of capital necessarily involves corruption. In America, however, this corruption is not merely exhibited upon a gigantic scale, but, if we are to believe American critics, has become a recognized institution. While in Europe such corruption gives rise to censure and anger, in America it is treated with indifference or arouses no more than an indulgent smile. Lecky declares that if we were to judge the Americans solely by the manner in which they conduct themselves in public life, our judgments would be extremely unfavourable—and unjust. [247]

We cannot wonder, then, that North America should be pre-eminently the country in which the aristocratic tendencies of the labour leaders, fostered by an environment often permeated, as has just been explained, by a gross and unrefined materialism, should have developed freely and upon a gigantic scale. The leaders of the American proletariat have merely followed the lead of the capitalism by which the life of their country is dominated. The consequence is that their party life has also become essentially plutocratic. When they have secured an improved rate of wages and similar advantages, the officials of the trade unions, wearing evening dress, meet the employers in sumptuous banquets. At congresses it is the custom to offer foreign delegates, and even their wives, valuable gifts, jewelry, etc. The special services of the leaders are rewarded by increases of salary, which sometimes attain considerable figures. We learn from indisputable authority that many of the labour leaders, and especially of the trade-union leaders, regard their positions simply as a means for personal advancement. According to the testimony of the well-informed, the American working class has hitherto produced few leaders of whom it has any reason to be proud. Many of them shamelessly and unscrupulously exploit for personal ends the posts which they have secured through the confidence of their fellow-workmen. Taken as a whole, the American labour leaders have been described as “stupid and cupid.” [248] We owe to Gaylord Wilshire, himself also an American and a socialist, the following unflattering picture of the socialist leader: “He is a man who often expresses a social dissatisfaction based upon personal failure. He is very apt to be loud rather than profound. He is, as a rule, not an educated man, and his demands and urgings are based too often on ignorance.” [249] Intelligent and honest workmen are consequently repelled from the labour organizations or induced to follow false paths. We have even been told that not a few labour leaders are altogether in the hands of the capitalists. Being uneducated parvenus, they are extremely sensible to flattery, [250] but this seems to be among the least of their defects. In many cases they are no more than paid servants of capital. The “Union Officer” then becomes a “boss” in the hands of the enemy, a “scab” or, to use a still more significant American expression, “a labour lieutenant of the capitalist class.” [251] It is from the socialists themselves that we learn almost incredible details regarding certain categories of American workers who have achieved a privileged position, but who are utterly devoid of moral sense. Among the best organized unions there are some which enter into regular treaties with the capitalists in their respective branches of industry in order to exploit the consumer and to effect with the capitalist a friendly division of the spoil. [252] In other cases, the leaders of a federation of trade unions, bribed by one group of employers, will organize strikes among the employees of another group. On the other hand, many strikes which are progressing favorably for the workers come abruptly to an end because the employers have made it worth the leaders' while to call the strike off. The absence of socialist tendencies among the American workers, their lack of class consciousness, have been noted with admiration by distinguished writers and leading members of the employing class, who praise these workers for their exceptional intelligence, and hold them up as examples to the degenerate and lazy European working men. [253] Yet these same intelligent American workers are led by the nose by such men as we have been describing, and appear to be the only ones who fail to notice the misdeeds of the labour leaders. Indeed, they favor these misdeeds by refusing to work at the same bench with those of their comrades who, more perspicacious than themselves, have attracted the enmity of the leaders by discovering and unmasking the frauds of the latter. [254]

The history of the organized working class in North America certainly rivals, in respect of the frequent occurrence of corruption, the history of a part of the capitalist class in the same country. A historian of the American labour movement exclaims: “It is in both cases a sordid and dreary tale and, in the case of organized labour, is unrelieved to a disappointing degree by the heroism and sentiment which have played such a conspicuous part in the labour movements of other countries. The cynicism of a civilization based on cash seems to have found its way into the bones of both capitalist and proletarian.” [255] The American labour movement is the purest in respect of its proletarian composition and is at the same time the richest in examples of social perversion. Side by side with the vulgar and interested corruption to which we have referred, there exists, indeed, a corruption which arises from idealism, and the latter must not be confused with the former. It sometimes happens that the leader allows himself to be induced by pecuniary considerations to attack a given party, the money being furnished by other parties or by the government. That he should do this presupposes, indeed, that his point of view regarding money is non olet; but he acts as he does exclusively in the interest of his party, and not a penny of the money he receives goes into his own pocket. An American political economist has justly pointed out that such corruption sometimes involves a heroic capacity for selfsacrifice on the part of the leader who, to secure advantages for the party with the foreign money, faces the fiercest attacks and the worst suspicions, and even, if need be, accepts his own political annihilation. He offers up his honor to the party, the greatest sacrifice that a man of honor can make. [256] Of this kind, for example, is the corruption of which the leaders of the poltical labour movement have frequently been accused by the liberals, namely, when they have accepted money from the conservatives or from the government in order to fight liberals or radicals. There are not a few instances of this kind in the history of the international labour movement. Thus, in England, during the general election of 1885, the leaders of the Social Democratic Federation, in order to run two candidates in metropolitan constituencies, accepted money from the Tory Party, whose aim it was to split the votes of its opponents, and thus to secure the defeat of the liberal candidates; the sum payable in this case was determined by the number of votes given to the socialist candidate, £8 for every vote. [257] Similarly, Constantino Lazzari, leader of the Milanese Labor Party, accepted from the government the sum of 500 lire to carry on an electoral struggle against the bourgeois radicals. [258] In Germany, the conduct of Schweitzer during the last years in which he was president of the Allgemeine Deutsche Arbeiterverein, conduct which led to accusations of corruption in which Bebel joined, appears to have been dictated by similar considerations. Such at least is the impression produced by a perusal of the various references to the matter made by Gustav Mayer. [259] In none of these cases is it fair to accuse the party leaders of personal corruption, since the money was not accepted for personal ends but for the supposed advantage of the party. Whether such procedures are politically wise, whether they make for the general advance of political morality, are different questions. Indubitably their influence on the mentality of the masses is not educational in a good sense. They are, moreover, especially dangerous to the leaders' own morale. Corruption for honorable motives is likely to be succeeded by corruption for dishonorable. If the method were to be accepted as a regular and legitimate element of party politics, it would be easy for able but unscrupulous leaders to put a portion of the price of corruption into their own pockets, and yet to remain more “useful” to the party than their disinterested and conscientious colleagues. This would be the beginning of the end, and would open the door to plutocracy in the party.

It cannot be said that the English labour leaders are in these respects greatly superior to the American, although in England, perhaps, corruption assumes a more subtle and less obvious form. At the Amsterdam congress (1906) Bebel related in a private conversation what Marx and Engels had. said to him once in London: “English socialism would certainly be far more advanced than it is to-day had not the capitalists been clever enough to check the movement by corrupting its leaders.” [260] Hyndman, the leader of the English Marxists, a man of bourgeois origin who sacrificed a diplomatic career for the sake of socialism, relates in his memoirs that many of the working-class leaders, and among these the most energetic and the most gifted, after having acquired a genuine political culture with the aid of socialist of bourgeois origin, have not hesitated to sell this new acquirement to the bourgeoisie. Nor do the workers themselves complain of this, for, full of admiration for what they call the cleverness of their leaders, they have by their votes rendered possible the gradual rise of these in public life. [261] Another writer well acquainted with the English labour movement declares: “A prominent labour leader remarked recently that the labour movement was a charnel-house of broken reputations. That puts it too strongly, but, in essence, how true!” [262]

Thus in the United States, and also, though to a less degree, in England, there exists a peculiar category of working-class leaders of proletarian origin. Among these there are unquestionably to be found many men of strong character, and many who are uninfluenced by selfish considerations, although but few who take lofty views, who are endowed with a fine theoretical insight, or capacity for coherent political work and the avoidance of opportunities for error. Most of them are excellent organizers and technicians. But apart from these somewhat exceptional categories, there can be no doubt that many of the labour leaders are half-educated and arrogant egoists. We might almost imagine that Diderot had a premonition of such individuals when he made his ambitious Parisian beggar, Lumpazius, say: “Je serai comme tous les gueux revêtus. Je serai le plus insolent maroufle qu'on eût encore vu.” [263]

6. CHAPTER VI
INTELLECTUALS, AND THE NEED FOR THEM IN THE WORKING-CLASS PARTIES

IN the early days of the labour movement the bourgeois intellectuals who adhered to the cause of the workers were regarded by these with profound esteem; but as the movement matured the attitude of the proletariat became transformed into one of undue crticism. This antipathy on the part of the rank and file of the socialists is based upon false presuppositions, and proceeds from two antithetical points of view. Some, like the group of the “Neue Zeit” and the “Leipzige Volkszeitung” in Germany, with the support of the revolutionary-minded workers of Berlin, of the two Saxonies, and of Rhenish Westphalia, persisting in the maintenance of intransigent revolutionary conceptions, think themselves justified in accusing the intellectuals of a tendency to “take the edge off” the labour movement, to “water it down,” to give it “bourgeois” characteristics, to rob it of proletarian virility, and to inspire it with an opportunist spirit of compromise. The others, the reformists, the revisionists, who find inconvenient the continued reminder principiis obsta! with which they are assailed by the revolutionists, in their turn attack the intellectuals, regarding them as meddlesome intruders, fossilized professors, and so on, as persons who are utterly devoid of any sound ideas of the labour movement and of its necessities, disturbing its normal course with their ideas of the study. Thus while the first group of critics regard the intellectuals as being for the most part reformists, bourgeois-minded socialists of the extreme right, the other group of critics classes the intellectuals as ultrarevolutionary, as anarchizing socialists of the extreme left. In Italy, towards 1902, the intellectuals found themselves placed between two fires. On one side the reformists claimed to represent the healthy proletarian energy of the economic organizations of the peasants as against the circoletti ambiziosetti (“the self-seeking petty circles”—i.e., socialist groups in the towns), which were composed for the most part, so they affirmed, of bourgeois and petty bourgeois. On the other side, the revolutionists of the “Avanguardia Socialista” group entered the lists against the employees and the bourgeois leaders, in the name of the class-conscious proletariat of industrial workers. Thus by both factions alike the intellectuals were treated as scapegoats and made responsible for all the mistakes and sins of the party. But both sides are wrong. Above all it is hardly possible to imagine the reasons which would induce refugees from the bourgeoisie to adhere to the extreme right wing of the working-class party. It is rather the adverse thesis which might be sustained by psychological and historical arguments which are good but not decisive.

1. Let us first consider the psychological arguments, Kautsky, referring to a period when “even by educated persons socialism was stigmatized as criminal or insane” (a period which Kautsky wrongly imagines to have passed away), makes the judicious observation that the bourgeois who adheres to the socialist cause needs more firmness of character, stronger revolutionary passion, and greater force of conviction, than the proletarian who takes a similar step. [264] The violent internal and external struggles, the days full of bitterness and the nights without sleep during which his socialist faith has ripened, have combined to produce in the socialist of bourgeois origin, especially if he derived from the higher circles of the bourgeoisie, an ardor and a tenacity which are rarely encountered among proletarian socialists. He has broken completely with the bourgeois world, and henceforward confronts it as a mortal enemy, as one irreconcilable a priori. The consequence is that, in the struggle with the bourgeoisie, the socialist intellectual will incline towards the most revolutionary tendencies.

There is, however, another reason which leads the ex-bourgeois to make common cause with the intransigent socialists, and this is his knowledge of history and his intimate acquaintance with the nature of the bourgeoisie. To the proletarian socialist it is often difficult to form any precise idea of the power of his adversaries and to learn the nature of the means at their disposal for the struggle. Often, too, he is inspired with an ingenuous admiration for the benevolent attempts at social reform patronized by certain strata of the bourgeoisie. Faced by the more or less serious or more or less deceitful offer of panaceas, he is often in the position of the peasant at the fair who listens open-mouthed while the quack vaunts the miraculous virtue of his remedies. Conversely the socialist of bourgeois origin will interpret more precisely the efforts made by the bourgeoisie to put the labour movement to sleep. His experience as a bourgeois will enable him to penetrate more easily the real motives of the different proceedings of the enemy. That which to his proletarian comrade seems a chivalrous act and proof of a conciliatory spirit, he will recognize as an act of base flattery, performed for the purposes of corruption. That which a proletarian socialist considers a great step forward towards the end, will appear to the bourgeois socialist as an infinitesimal advance along the infinitely extended road of the class struggle.

The difference of intellectual level between those who advocate the same idea, dependent upon their respective derivation from a proletarian or a bourgeois environment, must necessarily reflect itself in the manner in which they represent this idea in the face of non-socialists, and in the tactics they employ towards adversaries and sympathizers. The psychological process which goes on in the socialists of these two categories rests upon a logical foundation. The proletarian adherent of the party who remains a simple member of the rank and file attentively follows the progress made in all fields by the idea on behalf of which he is an enthusiastic fighter; he notes the growth of the party, and experiences in his own person the increase in wages secured in the struggle with the employers; besides being a member of the party, he belongs to his trade union, and often to a cooperative society as well. His experience in these various organizations induces a feeling of comparative content. He regards social evolution in a rosy light, and easily comes to take an optimistic view of the distance which his class has to traverse in order to attain to the fulfilment of its historic mission. Ultimately social progress is regarded by him as a continuous rectilinear-movement. It appears incredible, even impossible, that the proletariat should suffer reverses and disasters; when they actually occur, they seem to him merely transient phenomena. This state of mind renders him generous and considerate even towards his adversaries, and he is far from disinclined to accept the idea of peace with the enemy and of class collabouration. It need hardly be said that this disposition is yet more accentuated among those proletarians who attain to positions of eminence in the party.

2. These considerations do not lack historical corroboration. Their truth is confirmed by a study of the activities of those socialists who were born as members of the aristocracy, or in the upper strata of the bourgeoisie, such as Bakunin and Kropotkin, both Russian nobles and both anarchists, Frederick Engels, Karl Marx. As a rule, in all the great questions with which the party has to deal the ex-bourgeois socialist is in actual fact one who gives the preference to the most radical and intransigent solutions, to those which accord most strictly with socialist principles. It is of course true, on the other hand, that the history of the working-class movement shows that many “reformist” currents have been strongly permeated by intellectual elements. It is indisputable that even if German reformism was not actually created by the little phalanx grouped round “Der Sozialistiche Student” of Berlin, the reformist tendency was, from the days of its first inception, vigourously and ostentatiously patronized by the members of this group. A closer examination, however, shows very clearly that the strongest impulse to the reformist tendency in Germany was given by the trade-union leaders, by persons therefore of proletarian origin. Moreover, it is the most exclusivist working-class movements which have everywhere and always been most definitely characterized by the reformist spirit. In illustration may be mentioned: the French group of the International Working-men's Association which assembled round Fribourg and Tolain; the English trade unionists; the “integralists” in France, whose origin was the “Revue Socialiste,” edited by the gentle ex-manual worker, Benoit Malon (the note of alarm against this form of socialism was sounded first by the medical student Paul Brousse, next by the intransigent Marxists under the leadership of Paul Lafargue, who had just secured his medical diploma in England, and finally by the man of letters Jules Guesde); the Independent Labor Party with the Labor Representation Committee; the socialists of Genoa, led by the varnisher Pietro Chiesa; the peasants of Reggio Emilia. This tendency has been manifest from the very outset of the modern labour movement. Bernstein says with good reason that, notwithstanding all assertions to the contrary, in the English Chartist movement the intellectuals were distinguished by their marked revolutionary inclinations. “In the disputes among the Chartists, the radical or revolutionary tendency was by no means characteristic of the proletarian elements, or the moderate tendency of the bourgeois elements. The most notable representatives of the revolutionary spirit were members of the bourgeoisie, men of letters, etc., whereas it was leaders of working-class origin who advocated moderate methods.” [265] To sum up, and putting aside the question whether the reformist movement has been a good or an evil for the working-class, it may be affirmed that generally speaking, the working-class leaders of proletarian origin have a special tendency to adopt the reformist attitude. In proof of this assertion it suffices to mention the names of Anseele in Belgium, Legien in Germany, and Rigola in Italy. The term possibilisme ouvrier is far from being a malicious invention.

It is not easy to furnish statistical proof of the statement that the socialists of bourgeois origin are more often revolutionaries than reformists. On the other hand, the history of Italian socialism during recent years offers an interesting demonstration of the adverse thesis (the causes of this peculiarity will be subsequently discussed). The official socialist organization of Milan, the Federazione Milanese, suffering from a chronic impecuniosity due to the slackness with which the majority of the members paid their subscriptions, proposed in the year 1903 an expedient which is frequently adopted by the Italian socialists. Henceforward the monthly subscriptions were no longer to be equal for all the comrades, but those who were better off were invited to pay more in proportion to their means. This reform, which was inspired by a thoroughly socialist sentiment, led the Milanese reformists (who in consequence of their differences with the revolutionists had for a long time been on the lookout for an honorable excuse to leave the federation, in which the revolutionary current was predominant) to resign their membership, declaring that they regarded the new system of payment as altogether unjust. On this occasion it appeared that it was the well-to-do members who resigned, so that these, the bourgeois, manifested the reformist tendency. [266] It is also to be noted that during recent years (since 1901) the great majority of Italian socialist intellectuals have definitely declared themselves to be reformists by a more or less unconditional adhesion to the opportunism of Turati. The cases just quoted seem to conflict with the rule previously enunciated that the refugees from the bourgeoisie are adverse to opportunism. But the inconsistency is no more than apparent. It has several times been pointed out that the intransigence of the ex-bourgeois socialist depends upon the circumstance that on his way to join the class-conscious proletariat he has had to make his way through a thorny thicket, struggling violently and suffering many injuries, and his courageous progress proves him to be endowed with an exceptional capacity of sacrifice for the ideal and with the energy of the born fighter. As the years have passed, however, this primal source of revolutionary energy has to a large extent dried up, because the path of the bourgeois adherent to socialism has become so much easier. It is a general law that when we change the soil we change the quality of the fruit. This is what happened in Italy.

The recent history of socialism shows that the intellectuals are distributed in nearly equal proportions among the various tendencies. Confining ourselves to German examples, we find that it is a doctor of medicine, Raphael Friedeberg, who has inaugurated anarchizing socialism; a similar tendency is exhibited by the Tolstoian-Kantian Otto Buck, doctor of philosophy, and Ernest Thesing, doctor of medicine and at one time a cavalry lieutenant. If among the reformists we find the barrister Wolfgang Heine, the former theological student Richard Calwer, the former student of political science Max Schippel, the pastor of Gohre, the sometime gymnasium teacher Eduard David, the doctor of philosophy Heinrich Braun, and many other intellectuals—we find in the opposite camp, that of the revolutionaries, the doctor of philosophy Franz Mehring, the doctor of medicine Paul Lensch, Rosa Luxemburg, Israel Helphant (Parvus), the former student Max Grunwald, the ex-barrister Arthur Stadthagen, the barrister Karl Liebknecht, and Karl Kautsky, who escaped only by chance the disgrace of the doctor's title. We see, then, that in Germany the intellectuals cannot be classed exclusively as revolutionists or as reformists.

* * * * *

The struggle against the intellectuals within the socialist party is due to various causes. It originated as a struggle for leadership among the intellectuals themselves. Then there came a struggle between the representatives of different tendencies: strict logical adhesion to theory versus criticism, opportunism versus impossibilism, trade unionism after the English manner versus doctrinal Marxism as a philosophy of history, reformism versus syndicalism. From time to time these struggles assume the form of attacks made by the bulk of the party upon some small heterogeneous element which has invaded the labour movement. It is not always the genuine manual workers, or those who have been such, that are the first to raise the cry of alarm against the intellectuals. But it is true that the working class has ever been suspicious of those elements in the party who were derived from other social camps. Clara Zetkin writes very justly: “The bourgeois refugee is apt to find himself lonely and misunderstood among his comrades in the struggle. He is at once a stranger and a citizen in the valley of the possessing classes, with which he is associated by education and habits of life; at once, also, a stranger and a citizen upon the heights of the proletariat, to whom he is bound in a firm community by his convictions.” [267] The power of tradition presses with peculiar force upon persons of culture.

The coldness of his reception in the new environment seems to him doubly hard. The intellectuals, who have entered the party under the spur of idealism, soon feel humiliated and disillusioned. The masses, moreover, are little capable of appreciating the gravity of the sacrifices which the intellectual often accepts when he adheres to the party. When Paul Göhre related to the Dresden congress how for love of the cause he had renounced his profession and his income, his social position, and even his family, a number of socialist journals answered that all this was, to put it politely, maudlin sentimentality, and that the socialist intellectuals, when they made such “sacrifices,” were not thinking of the cause of the workers but of themselves. In a word, the comrades showed themselves utterly insensible of the greatness of the sacrifice which Gohre had made for love of them. The truth is that upon this point, as upon so many others, the intellectuals and the proletarians lack the capacity of mutual understanding.

In Germany, as in Italy, France, and in some of the Balkan states, the gravest accusations have been launched against the intellectuals. There have been times in the history of German socialism in which the educated members of the party have been exposed to universal contempt. It suffices to recall the Dresden congress (1903), during which the whole complicated question of tactics seemed to be reduced to “the problem of the intellectuals.” Even to-day they are often treated as suspects. There are still intellectuals who think it necessary to demonstrate to the masses that, notwithstanding the aggravating circumstance of their social origin and their superior education, they are nevertheless good socialists. It is surely far from heroic, this persistence with which the intellectuals are apt to deny their true social character and to pretend that their own hands are horny. But we need not be deceived. Merlino hits the bull's-eye when he ironically warns us that this state of affairs lasts only until the moment when the intellectuals succeed in getting control of the working-class movement. [268] They now feel themselves secure, and no longer need wear the mask, at least in their relations with the masses. If they continue, none the less, to assume the posture of the humble demagogue, this is done from a vague fear of being accused as tyrants by the bourgeois parties, but still more in order to ward off the criticism of their working-class competitors.

It is proper to recognize that mistrust of the intellectuals, although in large part an artificial product, has its good side. For this mistrust leads no small number of cranky and eccentric intellectuals, who incline to play a picturesque part in joining the socialists, to turn towards other pastures. Nothing would be more disastrous for the workers than to tolerate the exclusive rule of the intellectuals. University study is not possible to those choice individuals alone who are endowed with exceptional natural gifts; it is merely a class privilege of persons whose position is economically advantageous. Consequently the student has no right to be proud of his ability and his knowledge. He need not glory in being able to write Dr. before his name or M.A. after it. Every proletarian of average intelligence, given the necessary means, could acquire a university degree with the same facility as does the average bourgeois. Besides, and above all, it cannot be denied, that for the. healthy progress of the proletarian movement it would be incomparably better that the mistrust of the workers towards the bourgeois refugees should be a hundred times greater than necessary, rather than that the proletariat should be deceived even once by overconfidence in its leaders. But unfortunately, as we learn from the history of the modern labour movement, even the total exclusion of intellectuals would not save the working class from numerous deceptions.

From the ethical point of view the contempt felt by the non-intellectuals for the intellectuals is utterly without justification. It is a positive fact that even to-day, in many countries, the bourgeois refugee who makes his adhesion to the party of the revolutionary workers, the party of “social subversion,” or, as William II expresses it, “the unpatriotic rout of those who are unworthy to bear the name of Germans,” suffers serious economic and social damage. On the other hand, the proletarian commonly derives advantage in these respects from joining the party of his own class, and is thus impelled to take this step from motives of class-egoism. Unquestionably the working class, struggling on the political field, needs recruits from its own ranks who can rise to the position of officers in the proletarian army. It is natural, too, that these leaders should be furnished with adequate means, and that they should be firmly secured in their positions. But it ill becomes the working men who have thus risen in the social scale to look down upon their ex-bourgeois associates, who have descended in the social scale, and have thereby become voluntary déclassés for love of the party.

It results from all that has been said that the campaign against intellectuals in the Socialist Party, however justified it may be in individual cases, is as a whole utterly unjust, and often inopportune and absurd. Even the German labour movement, despite the high degree of technical organization to which it has attained, could not dispense with intellectuals. Although, as we have seen, its general character is decisively proletarian, and although it has as authoritative leaders such men of proletarian origin as August Bebel, Ignaz Auer, Johannes Timm, Martin Segitz, Adolph von Elm, Otto Hué, etc., it may be affirmed that German socialism would lose much of its prestige if it were to eliminate the intellectuals.

According to Mehring, the use of the intellectuals to the proletariat is not so much to serve as fellow-combatants in the struggle, as to play the part of theorists who illuminate the road. He writes: “If they wish to be practical fighters and not theorists, they become altogether insignificant as adherents to the labour movement; for what could be the import of the adhesion of a few hundred intellectuals to the working-class millions, seeing that the latter are already much better equipped than the former for the rough and tumble of practical life?” On the other hand, he says, the intellectuals are of great value to the proletariat in the elabouration of the theory of class-struggle; they display the historical nexus between the labour movement and the world-process as a whole; they take care that the workers shall not lose sight of the purposive relationship of individual branches of their movement with the process of world-transformation which it must be their aim to effect with all possible speed. Thus the task of the intellectuals consists in “maintaining the freshness and vigour of the workers in their movement towards their great goal, and in elucidating for them the social relationships which make the approaching victory of the proletariat a certainty.” [269]

It is not necessary here to undertake a defense of the intelligence of the proletariat against those who, seeing that intellectuals are historically necessary to the socialist party, wish on this account to impugn the political capacity of the manual workers. Any one who has attentively followed the history of the international working-class movement will know how much goodwill and capacity are to be found in that proletarian party which, permeated with class-consciousness, has conceived the design of fighting for its own emancipation; he knows how much intelligence, devotion to duty, calm and indefatigable energy, have been displayed in this cause by the workers of every country. As managers of cooperative societies, employees of trade unions, editors of socialist newspapers, the proletarians have from the technical point of view displayed themselves as models whom the bourgeois who undertake similar activities would do well to imitate. If, notwithstanding all this, we commonly find in the international working-class parties that the bourgeois refugees are usually assigned the task of dealing with theoretical problems and in many cases, the supreme guidance in matters of practical politics (although in the latter sphere the proletarians always retain great influence); this phenomenon, far from being a testimonium paupertatis intellectualis on the part of the fighting proletariat, finds a perfectly natural explanation in the economic organization of contemporary production. This organization (while it permits the wage-earner, when conditions are favorable, to cultivate his intelligence), since it monopolizes the supreme advantages of civilization ad usum Delphinorum, makes it impossible for the intelligent worker to become an intellectual. Unquestionably modern production needs intelligent workers, such as are found among the modern proletariat. But it has need also of intellectuals, that is to say of persons whose natural mental abilities have received suitable training. Now a sufficient supply of these intellectuals is furnished by the master class, from among whose relatives they are recruited. Consequently it is not in the interest of private industry to open for the proletariat all the sluices of instruction. Moreover, as far as agriculture is concerned, many landowners cynically declare that the more ignorant the worker the better does he serve their turn. The consequence of all this is that the socialist of bourgeois origin has enjoyed that which the modern proletarian still necessarily lacks. The former has had time and means to complete his political education; he has had the physical freedom of moving from place to place, and the material independence without which political activity in the true sense of the word is inconceivable. It is therefore not astonishing that the proletariat should still be to some extent dependent upon bourgeois refugees.

In 1894, at the Frankfort congress of the German Socialist Party, a committee was appointed for the study of the agrarian question, and of the fifteen members of which it was composed no less than nine were intellectuals. This is a manifest disproportion, especially when we remember that among the leaders of the German Socialist Party there is an exceptional numerical preponderance of working-class elements. But the committee in question had to deal with scientific problems, and these could be solved by those alone who had received a scientific education. The same thing happens whenever legal, economic, or philosophical problems have to be treated with technical competence—in a word, whenever the questions under discussion are not fully comprehensible except by those who have made prolonged and profound preliminary studies. Cases in which the self-taught man is incompetent, present themselves daily. The increasing democratization of state institutions and the progressive socialization of the collective life, together with the securing of better conditions of labour for the workers, may perhaps gradually render the help of the intellectuals less essential. But this is a question for the remote future. Meanwhile, such a movement as that of the modern proletariat cannot afford to await that degree of maturity which would enable it to replace the ex-bourgeois among its leaders by men of proletarian origin.

The bourgeois elements in the socialist working-class party cannot be forcibly eradicated, nor excluded by any resolutions of party congresses; they are integral constituents of the movement for whose existence it is needless to offer any apologies. A political labour movement without deserters from the bourgeoisie is historically as inconceivable as would be such a movement without a class-conscious proletariat. This consideration applies, above all, to the early days of the labour movement; but it is still applicable to the movement in the form in which we know it to-day.